Two creators went to NYU’s business school, then decided to make a show about the news

The data is in: News creators and influencers are a major source of news for Americans, especially people under 30. This is the latest edition of Creators of Record, an occasional series of interviews with popular creators about how they do their jobs.

Sinha: Gaurav and I started making videos together during the spring 2023 semester, when I was a senior at NYU and he was a freshman. I had been doing a newsletter for a while, I had been doing stand-up comedy for a few years, and I was interning at CNN. It seemed like everything was [pointing to], “Hey, you should start making short-form videos.” And then Gaurav was like, “Hey, I’m actually really good at editing videos.”

We were not really thinking of it as a YouTube channel, but as making short-form stories. At the time, we were called Fifty50 Media. We were all about trying to distill the world into bipartisan perspectives. We eventually started focusing more on deeper-dive stories. We renamed ourselves to A Show About the News.

It’s very easy to put out a political opinion that goes viral, but we really wanted to focus on good stories. Eventually, we started making videos for Morning Brew, and we joined Morning Brew full-time as a franchise in August 2025.

Srivatchan: Some of them would pop off, get a million views. But the way people consume on the internet is very different from the way people consume when they go to a theater, [where] they’re paying for an experience and they’re going to watch a specific thing.

YouTube and social media are like a theater where you can leave and go watch another movie at any time. That’s the challenge of making videos on the internet.

Sinha: It was an economically stupid decision, but I knew that if I failed now, I would be young enough to start again. It’s easy to have the golden handcuffs of waiting until the right time, but there is never a right time.

It was taking a bet on myself and someone who I really trusted. Still, our videos were getting 12 views at that time; it wasn’t as if something took off and it was like, “Okay, this can pay our bills.”

Sinha: What we do, in the context of where we went to school, is the equivalent of becoming ballerinas. All of my friends are investment bankers in private equity or in consulting. That is the tried and true method [for NYU Stern graduates]. If you tell people, “Hey, I’m not recruiting for banking, I’m thinking of doing consulting,” they look at you like you just said you want to be an art major. When we said we were going to build a media company, it was truly mind-boggling for people.

I loved what Fareed Zakaria did, what Ezra Klein did, but my favorite people when I was a kid were Jon Stewart and John Oliver, Hasan Minhaj and Seth Meyers and Conan O’Brien and Nathan Fielder. I knew I wasn’t going to be a great stand-up comedian, I wasn’t going to be a great writer, but maybe I could combine those to make a job out of it.

It’s easy to pat ourselves on the back and say there’s a lot of garbage out there. But also, it has never been a better time to be an independent creator. If we both wanted to go into media today, we would be grabbing water for hosts who get paid $60 million a year. Instead, we actually get to put our own ideas out there.

Srivatchan: When it comes to shorts, either Shreyas or I will have something that really interests us for the week. We start scripting it, then we switch the scripts and each of us does a pass on the other’s. Then we revise them and film them. That takes roughly two out of five workdays. We spend the rest of the time on long-form.

We’re also doing a weekly livestream to discuss the headlines with the audience and build that audience connection. So our output is two native short-form, one long-form, and one live stream per week.

Sinha: Do we actually have something new to say about it? There’s no point in making a video that someone else has already made.

A lot of people have made videos about how people aren’t having kids anymore. That doesn’t mean we wouldn’t [cover that topic], but we need to have something new to say. In our video, we talked about how governments have spent tens of billions of dollars but it hasn’t resulted in any more babies. We talked about demographic trends and got into studies. We brought in a bunch of 19- and 20-year-olds and asked them why they’re not having more sex. Then we went to a bunch of older people and were like, “So, you guys were doing it hella in the 90s. What’s the secret? Let’s give it to these kids.”

The combination of all those things is what makes it A Show About the News video.

Sinha: We try to be funny, maybe to a deficit. In one of our worst-performing videos, we had a guy come in on an inflatable horse. Gaurav was wearing a Will Smith mask and slapped me. But sometimes it really works. We filmed this thing where we were having a shootout with Abraham Lincoln as he smoked a vape. That did great for us.

I listen to a lot of podcasts of serious, smart people. The way they talk, I’m like, how are you not ripping your hair off right now? How are you not just slamming your head against your desk?

Our videos are what we wish we could consume more of.

Srivatchan: We have all these sources that we regularly read. For a lot of politics and inside scoops on Capitol Hill, Politico is great. For more niche stories, ProPublica is great. Each source has its own strength. We send stuff to each other all the time.

Once we’re in the research phase of a video, we do everything possible to learn about what the scope of the video is and what sources and articles can fall into that.

We’d be dishonest if we didn’t mention AI. We don’t use AI at all in our scripting or production process, but Perplexity has been great for finding articles and different things on specific subjects. It’s been a huge timesaver, as well, [since] the internet is dominated by paid articles rising to the top in Google.

Sinha: We do a lot of our own fact-checking. Corrections often occur in the way of Gaurav coming to me and being like, “Shreyas, you moron, you said this and it’s actually this.” Then we record a voiceover, or we change it in the captions, or we just put it up as text.

We [request comment from] every company or person we talk about, so if they have something to say, we can try to incorporate it. We do [the fact-checking] ourselves.

Sinha: If you go on YouTube right now, high production quality is the expectation. It’s not like when I was young and my favorite YouTubers were clearly filming in their bedrooms. There’s so much money that is being invested into it, which is awesome, but if you want to have authentic relationships with your audiences, you need to do more.

[The livestreams] have been so much fun. We talk to people, ask them where they’re from, tell a story, and they have questions. It’s taking our videos to another level. We still have to learn how to grow, bring people to it, and keep them entertained.

Srivatchan: Earlier this year, TBPN [Technology Business Programming Network] was sold to OpenAI for $100 million. Their whole thing was live-streaming. They didn’t get that many viewers concurrently on their livestreams — everything was clips, targeting a very specific niche — but we saw how they grew through clips.

We also wanted to tackle news topics we don’t have the time to cover in shorts and long-form.

Sinha: When we started making these videos, I was writing articles on the side and freelancing so that I could pay rent. Eventually, this was able to pay rent.

By no means are we rich. But we really believe in the business model of digital media. It’s important to incentivize people to invest in media that is fact-checked, that is telling stories that are new and not just polarizing or viral for virality’s sake. You can’t ask people to only think of [media] as a charity expenditure or as a nonprofit, because those are the first things that go away when the market goes down, and the first thing people are going to stop cutting checks to if they don’t see the ROI.

We spend most of our time thinking about content, but it’s important to be creative about our business models. We always tell ourselves not to think about ourselves as employees or YouTubers, but to keep reminding ourselves that we’re founders of a startup that is trying to do something for the world.

The prevailing narrative that news media is doing poorly is because news media for generations was run by journalists, and that was fine because they could get cable carrier fees. But the reason they were able to do that was because they had a monopoly. You could only watch CNN, CBS, and ABC News because that’s all you had.

We blame consumers all the time, saying they should subscribe to newspapers, they should support TV news. We’re losing something really important by these companies being close to bankruptcy. But it’s not the consumers’ fault. There was no innovation from those companies, no leaning into newsletters. Once Morning Brew proved that they could do it, they got into podcasts, and they’re mostly all right. The New York Times is an excellent shop. But I’m yet to see that from ABC and CNN and NBC and MSNBC.

There’s been a huge stepping back from actually doing the job of being an inventor of new business models. That’s why we’re in this crisis. We blame consumers, we blame social media, but we really should be blaming media news executives a lot more. There’s a lot of money to be made in this. I want people to know there are people out there trying to build successful business models, not just relying on the charity of investors, rich people, and consumers.

Sinha: It’s hard to say what’s legacy and what’s new these days. Morning Brew has never had a TV broadcast or print media arm, but it’s owned by a media conglomerate, Axel Springer. Other news companies, from CNN to The Wall Street Journal, have pretty successful social media presences and journalists who’ve made a name for themselves.

The crisis for news companies that dominated in the 20th century is that they relied on fixed distribution: cable, broadband, local stations, and papers. A random Joe couldn’t get their ideas placed in those, so the competition for viewership was highly limited.

Today, competition is high. Legacy journalists who struggle often blame the changing tides of information consumption, when in reality they’re just struggling to compete for attention. Many have been successful in making the transition, so we don’t think it’s fair to paint all of legacy journalism as having something to learn from news creators. But our message overall would be that traditional news shouldn’t blame consumers for not maintaining their expensive newspaper and cable subscriptions, but instead [should] figure out how to compete and win in this new age.

In the same vein, news creators shouldn’t pat themselves on the back that they are “new media.” Most news creators — ourselves included — often package traditional news media’s breaking stories into our own voice, but we aren’t actually at the source. As news creators who have learned to compete in this new information era, it’s our job to figure out a business model that allows for long-term investigations that break real news to be profitable.

Srivatchan: For journalists who have been successful in their careers but want to transition to social media, we think they severely underestimate how well-prepared they are to make the jump. They’ve already been writing strong articles and hooks to get people to click. We think journalists underestimate how that skill can translate on a platform like YouTube, where everything is dependent on the packaging that gets someone to click on your video.

Often, when someone from traditional media starts a new Instagram or YouTube page, they make very lo-fi content, talking to their phone with their headphones mic. I think they see influencers doing that and think viewers want authenticity. That works for some people, but our view is that investing in strong production is the baseline expectation on social media.

Cleo Abram goes to Antarctica for her videos with an expensive camera crew team and equipment. That’s what you have to compete with, but also with everything else. I think journalists who are successful at making the transition are often those who forget their preconceived notions of what it means to be a social media creator and instead try to create the highest-quality product they possibly can. Max Fisher is an excellent example, as a former New York Times investigative journalist who grew his YouTube channel from 0 to 500,000 subscribers within months with simple, breathable, but heavily researched storytelling.

Instead of seizing the social media opportunity, often, legacy journalism is falling into the trap of liquidating its reputation for more attention and to better monetize its declining assets. It’s partnering with gambling apps — CNN’s partnership with Kalshi, or [Dow Jones’] with Polymarket — and inviting inflammatory internet voices rather than the trusted ones that educate.

The mainstream media should use its resources to enter the edutainment space rather than the virality/inflammatory space. That doesn’t mean avoid politics — it means tackle the underlying trends and principles of politics. Audiences don’t want to hear from viral Twitter voices on CNN panels. In reality, people want to learn.