The rise of real journalism rigor on YouTube, says Joon Lee

There are a lot of competing thoughts in the digital news creator marketplace right now, and they come down to perspective.

For example, when I talk to students and smaller newsrooms, I advise them to just get started and to create prolifically. Take your journalism and mold it to the vertical digital platform — even if it’s just you in front of a camera talking.

With no edits, no b-roll, no animations or graphics either.

LoFi content has been huge on YouTube for creators in 2025. But this prediction from Joon Lee in a series on 2026 predictions from NiemanLab tells us what else will soon be huge.

Journalistic rigor.

In the Digital Literacy class I teach at the University of Oklahoma, I take students through an exercise in which they compare digital news content from established, traditional journalists with that created by news influencers and creators. Inevitably, their analyses say that the traditional journalist could learn from the creativity of the influencer/creator, and the influencer/creator could learn from the rigor of the journalist.

And what Lee is saying in this piece is that journalistic rigor on digital platforms is going to be a big deal in 2026 and beyond. We’re already starting to see this with the comeback of the social media news partnerships.

Did you see this article from Meta? It’s called “Bringing More Real-Time News and Content to Meta AI.”

You don’t say.

Lee described the shift this way:

For the past decade, YouTube creators have spent their time trying to look less like journalists and more like entertainers. But the next phase of YouTube’s evolution is going to flip that dynamic: journalism is about to become the backbone of the platform’s growth, prestige, and cultural relevance.

And he attributed it to the 2024 election.

So, 99.9 percent of you don’t know me, but I left local TV news, where I was director of digital content for two CBS affiliates in Oklahoma, precisely because of the 2024 election. My reason was partly that I felt like local news had failed society, and also that there was an opportunity to help newsrooms everywhere amplify their vital work across the digital ecosystem.

Lee’s analysis is spot-on, though I acknowledge it might just be me being hopeful. If you take the time to watch videos on his YouTube channel, I hope you’re not discouraged by how highly produced they are. He does excellent work — but it’s at a level of quality you don’t have to achieve to do this well.

The journalistic rigor is what’s important here. I can’t do better on that front than the SPJ Code of Ethics. It will serve you well.

My recommendation to you is to be fair even to a fault. That doesn’t mean to ‘both sides’ everything to death, but it does mean acknowledging perspective. I personally try to live by the mantra of comforting the afflicted while afflicting the comfortable — and that is what it is. In my 20 years working in local newsrooms, especially the last 5-10, the most significant problems came from the second part of that equation, afflicting the comfortable.

But if you’re going to do so with any level of credibility, you will have to exercise journalistic rigor and follow that code of ethics. For what I do with my newsletter, ‘Oklahoma Memo,’ that means:

• To cite and over-cite the original journalism before I add to it

• To clearly communicate what I know and what I don’t know

• To leave the door open that I could be wrong and am open to correction

We’ll see if Lee is right. I sure hope he is because that would signal that these platforms and, maybe Big Tech in general, are coming back around to how important journalism actually is.

Reach out to me anytime: ryan@doabledigitalmedia.com

Check out my local daily news recap: OklahomaMemo.com