With Local News International, Dave Jorgenson becomes his own TikTok guy

Dhanesha: Tell me a bit more about your longform plans. When I talked to Joss Fong and Adam Cole at Howtown, they said they started off intending to only do longform videos, but had to add shortform because that’s what YouTube has been pushing. You’re kind of doing the opposite, starting in shortform and going to longform. How are you thinking about the different demands of each form?

Jorgenson: It’s funny you mention them, because I’ve been thinking about Howtown’s episode about Hot Ones, which was a great episode and was one of their best shorts too, because it gave you some information but not everything. They did a really good job of trickling it out there and getting me to watch the whole video. To that end, I am thinking that if we have longform, how do we use the shortform to tease it, but also enhance it? What’s that balance?

Since I went independent, Instagram Reels are doing really well. I did not expect that and I’m very confused by it, because I’ve been making fun of Reels for a long time. And that shortform content on Reels and TikTok is our bread and butter. We don’t want to stop doing that, because that’s what grows the audience.

This is why I’m so interested in that podcast or vodcast format. It’s not that it’s easy to do, but it’s slightly easier than, like, a video that goes all kinds of places. It can be weekly and sort of timely, where it’s not breaking news but doing what I do with TikToks a lot, which is basically: “This thing happened in the last few days. Let’s take a look at it through a fresh lens.”

I did that with the Sydney Sweeney thing, where I intentionally waited to see how people reacted and if it mattered. You could do that with a podcast on a weekly basis in a really fun way.

The other bucket we still want to figure out is longform that requires more production. We’re talking to other people about doing that. Maybe we can do six episodes that we work on over half a year, and they’re our pilot.

I’m talking about three different things. But the end goal is that, eventually, one of these things will be the main longform thing. The other stuff will not necessarily go away completely, but I’ll be focusing on one project. I’m trying to figure out which version of longform is better: Vodcast, or this more serious type of thing.

Because we still have the engine of the shorts going, we can play with this other stuff and see if it works. If the audience doesn’t like it, it’s not as if they’re going to go away. They’ll just say they didn’t like that experiment.

Lauren and Micah are here because they can manage all that stuff. I want to sit there and be creative in my sandbox. If they can handle the business end of it, the talking to whoever about partnerships or whatever, that sounds great, as long as I get to have fun over here. Part of the reason it worked so well at the Post for so long was that Lauren and Micah took on the other stuff while I just got to be happy. Now that we’ve left and I’m hearing more from them about all the other stuff that happened, I’m like wow you guys did a good job.

Dhanesha: Are you expecting that over time there will be more people in the sandbox with you? Like Chris, for example?

Jorgenson: Yeah, that’s where I want to head eventually. Unlike the TikToks and shorts, where I’m doing all the shooting and editing, the work for the longform series will be offloaded either to a sole contractor or to someone who we hire as an employee. The longform series that I was doing simultaneously at the Post, where I did six total episodes earlier this year, that was all me editing and shooting. That was the fastest way to burn out. The problem is that I like doing that. I enjoy it, but at a certain point you need to sleep.

Dhanesha: And having an editor is huge, I imagine.

Jorgenson: So much of my fear around going independent was about not having an editor. For years, literally years, I thought, “If I wanted to go independent, would I have to just send my videos to, like, three people and ask them to take a look at it? But I can’t do that every day.” Having someone — literally the exact same person — doing that is huge. It’s why we were able to immediately transition to a new channel.

Dhanesha: Both LNI and The Onion are leading a resurgence of comedy and satire in the news, partly, I think, because everything seems so bleak that we need a bit of a lift.

Jorgenson: Yeah. I went to the Webby Awards this year and [Onion CEO] Ben Collins was there. It was the first time I ever really got to talk to him. He’s thinking about this the same way I am: this is a moment to use comedy to dissect what’s happening.

Dhanesha: How do you choose your stories?

Jorgenson: Pretty much every day there’s something that is just so insane that you can’t not cover it. That’s a problem for us as humans right now, but it makes it easier to select a story.

I’m most interested in covering stories that people are going to hear a lot about and get a lot of misinformation about — where there have been a lot of people TikToking or YouTubing about it and maybe they’re well meaning, but they’re not giving out the best information. I want to be the source of good there as much as possible.

For longform, one of the ideas we have for the more premier, less current events–focused podcast is about this guy named Dave Jorgenson. He’s not me; he’s a honky-tonk country singer in Texas. He owns davejorgenson.com and the Dave Jorgenson Instagram handle. I have the Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube Dave Jorgenson handles. For over a decade, there’s been this unspoken wrestling between us about who gets what. I’m pretty sure I stole his Twitter account because it was inactive; I emailed Twitter in like 2016 and they gave it to me. He might know that I stole that from him.

We want to go to Texas, to one of his concerts. He has, like, six a year total that he puts on his website. They’re all in the same town. The idea is not to, like, demand the URL, but it’s just like an interview. What’s it like to talk to your internet doppelganger?

There’s another guy slightly north of him in Oklahoma who’s a watermelon farmer, and he bought all these URLs in the late 90s and sells them for millions of dollars. He owns LNI.com. There’s no world where we ever buy from him unless he agrees to give it to us for 10 watermelons or something. But we want to talk to him, too. The larger picture is, what is your identity online, and should you have these things? That’s becoming more and more important as people’s identity is their online identity.

Dhanesha: You have a big emphasis on media literacy, both in this conversation and in your newsletter. Tell me about your thinking around that.

Jorgenson: At the Post we had this thing called Misinformation Mondays, videos about something that people are getting wrong. Those did really well. What I learned about media literacy through that is that people do want to be more media-literate, but they also don’t want to be told that they were wrong about something. They want to be let down gently.

If you’re saying, like, “Hey dummy, those bunnies on the trampoline aren’t real,” people aren’t going to feel good about it. In my videos, I make myself the character who falls for it, and then there’s another character, also played by me, going, “No, this isn’t real.” The way in is through comedy.

That shouldn’t always be the case; sometimes people just need to deal with it, I suppose. But I think using comedy as the way in to teach media literacy has been really effective. My larger feeling about all this is that it should be taught in school.

Dhanesha: How are you thinking about platforms for LNI? You have every social media account except Twitter.

Jorgenson: Here’s the thing with Twitter. I have moral reasons not to be on it, but also, I just don’t recognize it anymore. In 2023 and 2024 there wasn’t a positive reaction to anything I was posting. It felt off. I gave up on Twitter, and it was pretty easy to ignore once I did.

Bluesky obviously leans left, but we’ve had a lot of newsletter signups through it, so there’s a reason to be there. As I mentioned, I’m confused by Reels, but it seems to be working lately. The reason I went on Reels in the first place was that I heard from a lot of people who said they didn’t have TikTok but did have Instagram.

For longform, YouTube is the place to be, unless we partner with another place that can post our videos on some other platform.

Dhanesha: Is there anything you can do now that you couldn’t do before?

Jorgenson: I’ve noticed a lot of people going, “Oh man, your videos are so much better now that you’re independent.” I’d been thinking they’re not that different, but really, it comes down to language. There are just certain things I can say now. I’ve intentionally, in the videos and the newsletter, said that there’s a genocide happening in Gaza, for example.

I’m still trying, as much as any journalist can, not to inject too much opinion into anything. I definitely veer into commentary a lot. That’s why I like having different characters in my videos, because they can provide different perspectives. You as the viewer might go, “Well, I think I know which character he agrees with,” but at least I’m giving you a full picture.

We want to start our own style guide. We recently posted our first video teasing that out with Chris. Eventually, we want to make a longform video talking about the history of style guides in newsrooms and the history of journalism in general. We’ll have a public, running style guide on our site, and we’ll explain why we made those choices.

Dhanesha: Tell me about the revenue strategy. Where’s your funding coming from?

Jorgenson: There’s the newsletter, which has a paid tier, and whatever YouTube ad revenue we get. Those are small sources.

We’re looking for ad partnerships and video collaborations with companies. There are also nonprofit organizations. We work with Free the Facts, which pays for the Tuesday videos. It’s sponsored content in the sense that they’re helping me produce it and write it, but it’s very much things that our audience cares about, like Social Security.

A lot of other nonprofits are giving out grants to small newsrooms. We’re applying all over the place for those as well.

Dhanesha: And where did your initial funding come from?

Jorgenson: Our pockets, basically. We all have buyouts from the Post, though we’re pretending we don’t. But it’s nice to have that cushion, for sure.

Dhanesha: I was talking to another independent creator who told me his audience started being nicer to him as soon as he went independent, because they thought he was no longer tainted by big media. Have you experienced anything like that?

Jorgenson: Yeah. I will say I always felt lucky that people were generally pretty kind to me. That might just be being a white dude on the internet, I know that’s part of it.

But [when you go independent], you’re the underdog almost immediately. People want to support that because distrust in media is at an all-time high.

Before, it was like they were fans in spite of me being at the Post. By the way, I didn’t necessarily agree with that, because there are still a lot of people at the Post who are doing amazing work. If you actually stood in that newsroom, you’d talk to a lot of smart people who are really good at what they do. You might run into someone higher up that you don’t agree with. But 95% of the people there are really good journalists.

It’s complicated. But once I was free of that, it’s like [people] went, “Oh great, I can support him even more now,” whether that’s financially, or just following and commenting and liking things. The only encouragement I used to get was the very TikTok thing where people would comment “give this man a raise.” Now they say “support this man,” which is very nice.

Dhanesha: “Give yourself a raise.”

Jorgenson: [Laughs.] Exactly.

Dhanesha: Tell me about your pies in the sky. Pies in the skies? Either way, what are your hopes and dreams for LNI?

Jorgenson: I don’t want to just keep saying The Daily Show, but basically a version of it for a new generation. I started to feel that that was happening, ironically, at the Republican National Convention [RNC], where, if people weren’t coming up to tell me I look like JD Vance, they were coming up to say they liked my channel. They were young Republicans, so when the first one did it, I thought he was messing with me. But they were being sincere.

One person said, in a really honest and thoughtful way, “I don’t really agree with a lot of what you say” — which is interesting, because I would argue most of it is facts — “but I really like your videos, they’re really funny.” And I went, “That’s very nice of you. Thank you for having that complicated opinion about me.”

I think there’s a real epidemic of young men not knowing how to communicate outside of the internet. So I’m very happy to be somewhere for them to find balance in a world of a lot of potentially toxic people.

Dhanesha: How do you think about the politics of your audience?

Jorgenson: A lot of people have asked if I’m going to go more left now. Really, I’m just trying to cover it the best I can factually. In one of the first newsletters, we said that if we see fascism, we’ll call it fascism. But in my mind, that’s fact-based reporting.

I think part of the secret sauce is that I don’t necessarily have an agenda. AI is a good example: I’m trying to be as nuanced as possible on AI. My personal initial gut reaction to anything AI is that it is bad. But I’m trying to take each individual story and be as fair as possible about it. I think that’s something the audience appreciates.

Dhanesha: And maybe it helps that you look like JD Vance. What’s that like?

Jorgenson: I’m trying to embrace it. I did the first JD Vance lookalike TikTok back when he first got elected to the Senate. When we were covering the RNC in Milwaukee, he was announced as the VP nominee the day we got there, and I decided to lean into it. The one thing I’m clinging to is that SNL will need someone to guest-star every once in a while.

But also, just to put on my content creator hat for a minute, it drives a lot of comments. People love to play with it. There was a video recently where I nod straight to camera, basically acknowledging that the JD Vance character looks like JD Vance, and all the other characters went “I don’t see it.” I think what’s fun is that I’ve been doing this long enough that people have bought into this weird world so they don’t really overthink it. Or if they do, it’s funny to overthink it, so it works either way.

The other joke that I’ve been kind of pushing is that I am actually JD Vance, and I secretly run this channel. So don’t tell the White House.

Pictures by David Elliott, courtesy of Local News International.