Why I Trust Creators | Before the News Even When I Know I Shouldn’t

I’ve noticed something about the way I get information now. Not in a dramatic, “the world is changing” kind of way—just in the small, automatic moments. When something happens, I don’t open a news app, search for an article, or wait for a headline. I check who’s talking about it—a video, a story, a quick breakdown, someone explaining it in real time while it’s still unfolding. And more often than I’d like to admit, I trust that before I trust anything else.

It’s not that journalism disappeared. It’s still there—verifying, contextualizing, trying to get it right. But it doesn’t feel like the first place information lives anymore. Creators got there first, and once you’ve already seen something, reacted to it, and formed an opinion, it’s hard to go back and unsee it just because a more accurate version shows up later.

I follow people like Cole Bennett, who breaks down Canadian politics in a way that feels immediate and digestible, or Aaron Parnas, documenting U.S. politics almost as it happens and translating complexity into something you can understand in seconds. Then there’s Max Tkachenko, showing daily life in Kyiv during war—not as a headline, but as lived experience. Watching them, it’s hard not to feel like you’re getting something real—something unfiltered and direct.

That’s the shift. Not just in where information comes from, but in what feels trustworthy.

Creators don’t feel like institutions. They feel like people. You see their face, hear their tone, watch them react in real time. There’s no anchor desk, no scripted delivery, no distance. And that closeness does something subtle: relatability starts to feel like credibility. But relatability isn’t the same as authority, and that’s where things start to slip.

Traditional journalism was built on distance. Reporters gather information, editors verify it, and the final version is structured, polished, and—ideally—accurate. There’s friction in the process, and that friction is what makes it reliable. Creators remove that friction. They show you the moment as it’s happening—the confusion, the reaction, the interpretation in real time. It feels transparent, even when it’s incomplete. And somehow, that transparency feels more honest than polish, even when the polished version is more accurate.

A creator can say, “Here’s what I’m seeing, here’s what I think,” and it feels like you’re being let in. A news outlet says, “Here’s what happened,” and it feels final, distant, closed. One invites you into the moment, the other delivers the conclusion. So we start to trust what feels true over what is true, not consciously or deliberately, but naturally.

And once that shift happens, everything changes. Creators aren’t just informing you—they’re shaping your first impression of reality, and first impressions stick. There’s no pause anymore, no space between event and interpretation, just immediate meaning delivered in real time and optimized to hold your attention.

The problem is, being early and being right are not the same thing. But in the system we’re in, being early wins.

I can feel that tension when I scroll. I know a 60-second breakdown can’t capture everything, that context takes time, that accuracy isn’t always immediate. But I still watch, still absorb, still decide what I think before I even realize I’m doing it.

It’s not that creators replaced journalists. It’s that they replaced the moment where we used to wait—and that moment mattered more than we realized. Because now, by the time the full story arrives—verified, contextualized, complete—it’s not shaping our opinion. It’s trying to correct it.

And most of the time, it’s already too late.

~smy