Pivoting to Creator

An interview with Liz Kelly Nelson, who wants to help journalists navigate the independent creator economy.

A few years ago, Liz Kelly Nelson was the vice president of Vox and found herself holding the same exit interviews over and over again. Talented journalists kept leaving for independent ventures on Substack and YouTube, and she didn’t know how to get them to stay. She’d always been a believer in traditional media: she’d worked at the Washington Post; the Desert Sun, in Palm Springs, California; Gannett. But now, talking with colleagues departing Vox, as she told me, “when I started having conversations with them about the reasons that they were making this decision, and then studying audience habits, and where next-generation audiences were going to get their news and information, I found that I agreed with them.” Soon, she left too.

In 2024, Nelson became a Sulzberger Fellow at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. The fellowship served as an incubator for what became Project C, whose focus is to help “journalists navigating the independent creator economy” on platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, and Substack. Nelson now runs Project C as a newsletter and resource through which journalists leaving traditional newsrooms (by choice or by layoff) can pay for her expertise, which she continues to develop via research partnerships with the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and a nonprofit organization of visual journalists called the Video Consortium, among others. Project C’s signature “Going Solo” workshop lasts ten weeks and features a range of instructors tackling everything from audience development and editorial planning to ethics and standards and revenue-generation. The aim of Project C is to support those who “create rigorous, fact-based work,” Nelson said. “We have one journalist who launched a Twitch channel, Brian Fung, who’s a former CNN tech reporter, and he plays first-person-shooter video games while talking about tech policy. Our work is to help journalists navigate that sort of shift.” Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.