Joanna Stern is no stranger to new things. It’s part of the job: Stern began working as a technology journalist in 2007, the year Apple launched the first iPhone, and has covered the shifts in the industry through the rise of smartphones, the mobile internet, and AI. Along the way, she won an Emmy and helped launch The Verge, and spent the last 12 years at The Wall Street Journal, where she had a regular video and text column about personal technology. On April 22, she made an announcement: she was leaving her prestigious media job to make YouTube videos. Fittingly, she’s calling her channel New Things.
“I really wanted my own channel, to do things on my own terms,” Stern explained in her announcement. “With more humor and personality. And because we’re at a moment where we need tech guidance more than ever.”
Stern isn’t the first journalist to tread this path; last year, I wrote about Dave Jorgenson, the former Washington Post TikTok Guy who left to start Local News International, and Joss Fong and Adam Cole, the co-founders of Howtown, who had previously worked for Vox and NPR. Newpress, a relatively recent creator collective, is helmed entirely by veteran journalists.
Like those journalists, Stern is relying on a mix of subscriptions and sponsored content (denoted by a large label and her use of a large golden mic in her videos). But Stern isn’t leaving legacy media entirely behind: a longtime NBC contributor, she now has a deal with the channel that lets it use her content and customize it for its own platforms, which provides a baseline of stability that many independent journalists would be envious of.
I spoke with Stern about her vision for the channel, the work of building up a new audience from scratch, her new book — I Am Not A Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything — and how she’s using AI in her work. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
I’ve also talked to Dave Jorgenson [of Local News International] and Joss Fong and Adam Cole [of Howtown], and one thing in common for all of you is that you left large publications to do your own thing. They told me something similar about how they like having a team and the structures of journalism around them.
