This partial transcript was computer-generated. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.
Alexis Madrigal: Welcome to Forum. I’m Alexis Madrigal.
This show actually began with our own experience booking guests. Over the last few months, we noticed that more and more of our favorite journalists and columnists and reporters were no longer with mainstream media publications — and often, they weren’t with any publication at all.
Of course, there have long been freelance journalists, but the point of freelancing used to be selling your services to big publications — that was pretty much the only way to survive. Nowadays, that’s no longer true. It’s by no means easy to make it as an independent journalist or in one of the new collectives or worker co-ops, but it’s possible. And that seems like it may become increasingly important as corporate media gets gobbled up by billionaires installing their own junior editors at major outlets.
It’s a new day in media — and things are getting weird. To help us understand what’s going on, we’ve got three independent journalists I really love and deeply respect.
Nick Valencia, former CNN correspondent, now founder of Nick Valencia News. Welcome.
Nick Valencia: Hey. I’m so grateful to be here, Alexis. Thank you for having me.
Alexis Madrigal: We’ve also got Alicia Kennedy, food and culture writer and founder of From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy. Welcome.
Alicia Kennedy: Thank you so much for having me.
Alexis Madrigal: And we’ve got Brian Merchant — writer, reporter, author, and founder of the newsletter Blood in the Machine, also the author of a book by the same name. Welcome.
Brian Merchant: Hey, Alexis.
Alexis Madrigal: Brian, your career — let’s start there. You’ve all had different trajectories, but I’ve known you as a widely respected tech journalist and author. Give me five or six years of what that’s looked like on your LinkedIn.
Brian Merchant: Well, if you look back five years… let’s see. It’s even hard to keep track.
Alexis Madrigal: Sounds like last decade.
Brian Merchant: Yeah. I came up at Vice, which is now bankrupt. Great time while it lasted. Then I went to Medium, which was doing a big experiment in editorial-focused journalism on its tech platform.
Alexis Madrigal: For, I think, the third time.
Brian Merchant: Right — for the third time. That lasted about a year and a half before the founder got tired of it and fired everybody. So that was a mass layoff. Then I went to the L.A. Times, where I was excited to find some stability and security in legacy media — and that also lasted about a year and a half before there were mass layoffs there too.
Alexis Madrigal: It’s kind of amazing. We all came up in this world of incredible instability, but there used to be this sense that there were rising digital publications you could step into — even if newspapers or legacy media were eroding. But even that doesn’t seem true anymore.
Brian Merchant: Yeah. Not at all. There was a period where it seemed like digital media was going to usher in something new — different incentives, different drives — maybe even a replacement for legacy media. But that hasn’t turned out to be the case at all. BuzzFeed, Gawker, Vice — the three biggest digital media enterprises of that era — have all either gone bankrupt, dissolved, sold off, or become radically different than they were.
Alexis Madrigal: Not to mention the four million other publications that targeted so-called millennials. But yes, exactly. All that’s gone.
Alicia, let’s talk about your path — maybe a little more traditional at first as a freelancer?
Alicia Kennedy: Absolutely. I started my career in 2009 as a digital copy editor at New York Magazine. I stayed there for a while, started to freelance on the side, and then in 2015 decided to go fully into food writing.
In the beginning, I had jobs as a contributing editor or assistant editor — things that paid the bills while I wrote features and did reporting for other outlets. I was also a contributing writer at The Village Voice for a while.
Then in 2020, I saw the writing on the wall that this wasn’t going to last — and that’s when I started my newsletter to do the kind of work I didn’t have a place for in other outlets.
Alexis Madrigal: So for you, was it as much pull as push?
Alicia Kennedy: Honestly, I was pushed by circumstances, but I also found a lot to enjoy in writing pieces that had no space in mainstream food media — more essayistic work, cultural criticism, and the kind of writing I really wanted to do.
Alexis Madrigal: Because the food media world, at least in the corporate sense, is fairly constrained, right? There’s a magazine called Gastronomica, but it probably had a circulation of like a thousand. It’s not like you could go to Food & Wine and do the kind of work you do on your newsletter.
Alicia Kennedy: Exactly. It’s very constrained. It’s very focused on selling, on restaurants, on keeping everyone happy. Yum-yum. I don’t want to say my work is miserable, but I do get into the weeds on the food system.
Alexis Madrigal: Bitterness is an important flavor, right? Classic for media.
Nick, let’s talk about your trajectory. Give me your path into becoming a CNN correspondent — which, to me, always seemed terrifying. Anything on television seems terrifying. But you seemed to do it very well and make your way through CNN.
Nick Valencia: To pick up on Alicia’s point — I’m a journalist, so I’m always miserable. That’s my flavor of every day.
This was the longest first job in history. I was one of six people to rise from the rank of teleprompter operator to correspondent — something I was really proud of.
Alexis Madrigal: Wait, does that mean you literally ran the teleprompter?
Nick Valencia: I did. Some of the anchors — like Anderson — I used to run his teleprompter. Then, a couple years later, I was going live with the guy who inspired me to go into news. It was pretty cool.
Alexis Madrigal: Wow. And as you saw the landscape of journalism — particularly broadcast journalism — I imagine CNN was the pinnacle for you.
Nick Valencia: Yeah. It’s the apex of news. But in legacy media, one of the big challenges was “drive-by news.” I was lucky if I got five minutes for a segment. If I was doing something in Spanish, maybe a little more time.
When CNN and I couldn’t come to terms on a contract, I saw it as an opportunity. That Monday morning, we ended talks. Monday afternoon, I got a short-term job with the History Channel that put me out on the streets of Los Angeles just as the social resistance movement was sparking.
For all of us here, journalism is within us — and I had my phone. Vertical video is what we’re optimized for. I just set myself in the streets alone, had some clips go viral, and felt like I met the moment. I’m still going, a hundred days later.
Alexis Madrigal: Wow. And did you just spin up a little indie media company out of your dining room table where you’re sitting right now?
Nick Valencia: That’s right. I launched it off my back foot. We’ve had more than 14 million views over the last hundred days across social media.
Initially, I was just trying to meet the moment. I saw my community being attacked, the president going after “criminals” — but they were really targeting taqueros and cooks. I wanted to educate my viewers. Because of my history at CNN and my approach to journalism, I have people who don’t usually watch the news but have always watched me — including some who voted for the president or are part of the MAGA movement.
I saw a real opportunity to help educate those viewers who weren’t getting information — or were getting disinformation — as legacy media has become much more controlled than it used to be.
Alexis Madrigal: Alicia, you’ve been at this the longest as an independent creator. What’s surprised you about the actual survival part of the job?
Alicia Kennedy: It requires you to do every job yourself. You have to develop a lot more business acumen than I was ever trained for. I do social media strategy, editorial planning, design, photography — everything.
And you have to be aware of how the audience can capture you. You don’t want to become beholden to one thing they want. So I try to mix it up and offer new things. It’s a lot more than you ever imagine — you have to do so much.
Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. Brian, what about the lack of institutional support? Do you feel like your work has the same impact? If you write an investigative piece about tech and labor — your wheelhouse — can it reach the same places it would if you were with a big-name publication?
Brian Merchant: That was my number-one concern when I considered taking the plunge and doing this full-time.
When I was at the L.A. Times, I could write a column directed at a legislator or a law or proposal and feel like maybe I could help instigate change or at least put my thumb on the scales around issues I cared about. Especially writing about labor in the U.S. — it’s easy for mainstream media or audiences to disregard that.
So yeah, my concern was: will my work still get received in the same way without an institutional name behind me?
And actually, it’s been resolved in a good way. The answer is yes — I can get the same reach, or close to it. I can also speak more forthrightly. If I believe something’s important, I can just go all in, and people respond to that.
Because of this atomization of media — and because producers and editors now recognize that a lot of journalists have found alternative homes — legacy media isn’t the only game in town anymore. You can still get picked up by The New York Times. You can still get read by legislators.
Alexis Madrigal: We’re talking with three independent journalists about the shifting landscape of media: Brian Merchant, Alicia Kennedy, and Nick Valencia. Give us a call — 866-733-6786.
What questions do you have about this new and strange media landscape?
I’m Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned.
