YouTube star Johnny Harris on his Growing Media Empire

Harris charts the future of media & his business model for NewPress

Welcome back to The Red Letter. You can listen to my interview with YouTube star Johnny Harris on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, and Amazon Music.

Welcome back to The Red Letter. You can listen to the above interview with YouTube star Johnny Harris on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, and Amazon Music.

YouTube may be 20 years old, but legacy media is just now realizing it’s become the largest platform in the world. That’s why major podcasters such as Ezra Klein, The Bulwark, The Free Press, Chuck Todd and yours truly have decided to transition and partner with the network.

This modern audience, particularly for politics, is on YouTube because they have an allergy to legacy media and take pride in finding the content creator or journalist who speaks in their style. My ABC News and POLITICO credentials may open doors in the Acela Corridor but they work against me in the YouTube forest, where many viewers are unfamiliar or couldn’t care less about political talk shows.

And YouTube has its drawbacks, too. It rewards clickbait and rage casting, and some creators use these platforms to spread disinformation by cosplaying as journalists.

But while there are a lot of frauds and bloviators on YouTube, there are also exceptionally talented journalists who I deeply admire and am rooting for—and one of them is Johnny Harris. His documentary-style journalism is spectacular. There is nothing low-budget about the edits, the aerial shots, the research, or the field reporting. When I watch his hour-long exposés on my SmartTV—including some of the most random topics like “The REAL Reason McDonalds Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken” or his latest piece “Inside the Most Prepared Country on Earth” where he trains with the Finnish army on the Arctic Russian border—I’m entranced, continually moving from one suggested video to the next. (Which is exactly what YouTube wants.)

Harris’s content is so well researched, so thoughtful, so earnest, and he opens the viewers up to the process. I believe this form of journalism—openly admitting mistakes and navigating gray areas —is so needed in this time to re-establish trust with the audience. It may be the only way to save the profession, which is why I’ve embraced his expository style myself. We need to show audiences how we commit the act of journalism, and Harris does all that while putting his ego aside.

“The culture of YouTube and the culture of the internet is like, people want to follow people and they want to get into that person's mind and see what they're thinking,” Harris told me. “And the more authentic that is, the more you actually develop a sense of trust.”

“Whereas in the old days, the more revered your institution was, and consistent it was, that's where you developed trust,” he said.

“So it's a weird sort of inversion that we're going through right now.”

The 36-year-old former Vox journalist has been rewarded for this work with 6.6 million followers on YouTube. He’s a veritable celebrity making millions of dollars per year on YouTube through AdSense. And this is something that he’s created in the five years since his Vox show Borders was canceled during COVID. Harris has a full-scale operation with an overhead of $100,000 per month and a staff of more than 30 people. (Johnny and I share a thumbnail artist Adam, who is actually the DaVinci of YouTube artists.)

YouTube videos about Harris rake in hundreds of thousands of views, and he rarely sits for interviews himself, but he sat down with me on Friday to talk about how he’s expanding his media empire under the banner “NewPress,” as well as the future of journalism. We connected last month at a private dinner hosted by Substack during the White House Correspondents’ dinner weekend, where he said he might expand into the content that I create—political reporting, analysis, and debates that rely on talking heads. Although in this interview, he reveals a twist,