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Editor’s note: This post is part of News From Creatorland, a column where journalist and entrepreneur Fernando Hurtado shares learnings and observations from the frontlines of creator journalism.
As I was preparing to leave NBC to launch my independent YouTube channel In The Hyphen, I had a few informational interviews. All of them were extremely enlightening, but one of them sticks with me to this day.
That conversation was with Cleo Abram, the former Vox journalist who in 2022 launched Huge If True, where she tells optimistic stories about science and technology. I didn’t record the conversation, so I don’t have verbatim quotes, but this was the gist of it:
“When are you launching?” I remember her asking me.
“As soon as I have five long-form videos in the can,” I said. “That’ll give me a nice production buffer.”
“Five? That’s too many,” she said. “You want to be listening to your audience in real-time. Having too many videos pre-produced will prevent that. I would have max two.”
That piece of advice went against much of what I’d been practicing at my job at NBC. As a manager of digital video, part of my job was overseeing production of a few evergreen series. With those, the goal was always to have as many episodes pre-produced as possible before launching. The other half of my job was producing breaking news videos for the NBC and Telemundo stations, where you simply can’t prepare anything in advance, so I tried to get control wherever I could.
Since that call with