A good case study in how news companies are working with content creators is The Washington Post’s just-launched WP Creator, a standalone unit built to partner with independent creators on social video content.

Sara Goo, who has spent many years in the newsroom at The Post, NPR, and Axios, leads it. I asked her how it works.

What WP Creator actually is

The goal is to partner with independent creators, people with subject-matter expertise and established audiences on social media to co-produce video content. It is not a newsroom project. WP Creator deliberately operates outside of The Post’s editorial and opinion sections, under its own label: WP Creator content, not Washington Post content.

The first series, Let’s Talk Numbers, recently launched with creator JC Rodriguez, who helps his Gen Z audience navigate personal finance decisions through man-on-the-street interviews. Each episode is published on JC’s own social channels, on WP Creator’s dedicated channels, and on The Washington Post’s Watch Tab.

The unit works with creators who are not necessarily classical journalists. They’re vetted subject-matter experts with established audiences. The Post retains editorial veto, handles fact-checking and legal review, and co-develops the series framework. Creators retain their intellectual property, keep their own style, and are compensated through content partnerships. When sponsorships are secured, creators share in that revenue, too.

The strategic logic is straightforward: reach audiences The Post doesn’t currently have — younger, social-native, video-first — in the places where those audiences already are. Not to pull them back to the Web site but to show up with quality content where they actually spend their time.

It’s also worth talking about the economics of this model. Creators produce their own content using their own equipment, but they retain their intellectual property. For The Post, that means significantly lower production costs than building an in-house video operation. The model is attractive for both sides, but part of why it works is because it’s lean.

When I asked Goo about the reasoning, she reached for an analogy that makes a lot of sense: “Newsrooms have always lent their platforms to trusted sources. Columnists, photographers, freelancers. To me, this is just another version of that for modern times.”

The difference is the model. Creators make money through brand messaging on social media, a practice that doesn’t fit within The Post’s editorial standards. This is also one of the main reasons WP Creator sits outside the newsroom and operates under its own label. A distinction that matters, Goo says, for everyone involved: the audience, the advertisers, the creators and the newsroom.

Getting the newsroom on board

Getting the newsroom on board wasn’t straightforward.  

WP Creator was conceived in late summer 2025 — months before The Washington Post announced the elimination of more than 300 jobs in February 2026. But the public content launch and the cuts landed close together, and the optics were unavoidable: a new unit built around creators who are not journalists, working in a model that explicitly sits outside editorial standards.  

That can be a difficult sell internally, however good the strategic logic.

Goo doesn’t shy away from the tension. She describes the buy-in process since she started last August as an ongoing conversation rather than a solved problem:

“It really is about impacting the bottom line. And journalists understand the economy they’re working in. They even see their colleagues who have left doing this kind of work. They understand what’s changing.”

At the same time, it is important to Goo to underline that WP Creator is additive to the newsroom’s work, not competitive: “We’re trying to support the newsroom’s work, not take away from it. We’re trying to find that right balance.”

The content opens up a new revenue stream. And on that point, she is direct: “Money talks. When you see how much money is going towards this space and you see colleagues trying it and finding success, you take it more seriously.”

What she learned from creators

What WP Creator is building is still early. Goo was refreshingly honest about that: “We’re figuring it out as we go.” But the direction is clear, more series will follow, with the next launching at the end of the month around the topic of health.

Goo finds the collaboration with creators genuinely inspiring.

“The thing I really respect about working with creators is they remind me of when I was a reporter. They’re very scrappy. They’re entrepreneurial. They’re passionate about their audience. A lot of what they do is very journalistic in nature.”

And then, almost as an aside: “I think this is a space journalism should own.”

She’s right. And that’s important because for a long time, journalism didn’t act like it wanted to. The WP Creator model is one way of reclaiming that space — not by replacing journalists with creators or creators with journalists but by finding what each side does well and building something together. Whether that balance holds is a question worth following. 

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