- January 1, 2023
- Posted by: Stratford Team
- Category: Economy
This summer, I went straight from VidCon — the largest creator conference — to a labor journalism seminar with the Sidney Hillman Foundation. One day, I was chatting with famous TikTokers about their financial anxieties (what if they accidentally get banned from TikTok tomorrow?), and the next, I was learning about the history of American labor organizing.
These topics are not at all unrelated: at its core, writing about creator economy is labor journalism. The creator beat is a labor beat.
Creators are rebelling against the traditional route to making a living in artistic industries, taking control over their income to make money for themselves, rather than big media conglomerates. Consider creators like Brian David Gilbert, who built a devoted fanbase as a chaotically hilarious video producer for Polygon, the video game publication at Vox Media. Gilbert quit to work on other creative projects full time, likely because he realized that with…
