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.
On a September afternoon in Manhattan’s Union Square neighborhood, Shreyas Sinha is sitting on a toilet, wearing a blue suit. Looking into the camera, he asks, “Why is it that everything I’ve been eating this year is giving me diarrhea?”
Sinha is about to link the 2026 cyclospora outbreaks to decades of problems at the Food and Drug Administration. “I’m only allowed to make three diarrhea jokes in this video,” Sinha says. “I live in tyranny.”
The toilet video is one of the tamer stunts that Sinha and his co-creator, Gaurav Srivatchan, have pulled for their YouTube channel, A Show About The News, a weekly deep dive into major business and politics stories (tagline: “Critics are calling it the worst alternative to mainstream media, and those are just the critics I’m related to.”)
In a video about why young people can’t afford to buy homes, Sinha pops out of a cardboard box on the street and takes former New York City mayor Eric Adams to a studio apartment filled with men. Other recent videos include a 45-minute interview on the street with former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, an explainer on prediction market ads, and a rap music video on why retirement investments are safer than get-rich-quick schemes.
Sinha, 25, and Srivatchan, 22, met in 2023 when they were students at New York University’s Stern School of Business. They teamed up to make short vertical explainer videos, but those didn’t take off as much as they’d hoped. In 2024, Sinha quit his finance job to pursue A Show About The News full-time, and they transitioned to creating long-form deep dives with a dash of their own humor.
In 2025, Sinha and Srivatchan signed a contract to make the show as a franchise of Morning Brew. (They declined to share the specifics of the partnership.) Sinha anchors most videos, with Srivatchan directing, editing, and producing. A Show About The News has 97,000 YouTube subscribers and 84,000 Instagram followers.
I chatted with Sinha and Srivatchan about how they launched their media careers, how they use humor to explain the news, and what they think business opportunities are for creators today. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
We also wanted to tackle news topics we don’t have the time to cover in shorts and long-form.
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. I put that out there to say there’s a lot of money to be made in this because I want people to know that there are people are out there trying to build successful business models, and not just trying to rely on the charity of investors, rich people, and consumers.
[I asked Sinha and Srivatchan to answer a few final questions via email. Their answers are below.]
The crisis among news companies that dominated in the 20th century is 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.
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 headphone’s 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.
