Why the best journalists on YouTube are all former Vox employees

The company became a skunk works incubator that invented its own language of visual storytelling.

In September of 2020, the YouTuber Johnny Harris uploaded a video with a title written in all caps: “VOX BORDERS IS CANCELED.”

The announcement couldn’t have come as a surprise to many of his fans. Borders was an ongoing documentary series that featured Harris traveling all over the world to explain why cultures had decided to separate themselves into different countries — decisions that most of us experience as merely lines drawn on a map. Vox launched the show on YouTube in 2017, and it went on to span several seasons, with Harris flying everywhere from Haiti to India. Borders racked up over 143 million YouTube views — an average of 4 million views per video.

But by this point in 2020, we were six months into a global pandemic with no end in sight. Most people weren’t getting on planes unless they absolutely had to, and many international countries had installed strict Covid protocols that made it very difficult for Americans to enter. That meant production for Borders had come to a complete standstill, and Vox decided it was time to pull the plug.

In his announcement video, though, Harris didn’t seem angry about the decision; in fact, he spent a considerable portion of it praising his colleagues on the Vox video team. He started with his boss Joe Posner, who had greenlit the initial trip that led to the creation of Borders. “That opened something in me that I didn’t really know existed,” Harris recalled, “which was this obsessive, voracious desire to tell stories and explain things in faraway places.” He also praised Joss Fong, who was Posner’s first hire. “Her guidance over the years made me who I am as a storyteller. Every video you see on this channel has Joss Fong’s fingerprints on it. She taught me how to be a journalist, and I am forever indebted to her as a creator and as an editor.”

If anything, Harris was underselling Posner and Fong’s influence, not just on his videos, but on YouTube at large. The media trade publication Press Gazette regularly compiles data on the YouTube performance of most major publishers, and in its January 2025 ranking based on the average viewership of each channel — which it calculated by dividing the total channel views by the number of videos — Vox came out on top with an average 2 million views per video. Its next closest competitor had 1.3 million. In other words, Vox has a better YouTube hit rate than every other English-language publisher in existence.

That success isn’t a coincidence. Starting in 2014, Posner and Fong built out a scrappy team of journalists, many of whom had limited experience producing video, and together they began inventing their own form of visual storytelling, one that combined data viz, animation, sound design, expert interviews, and narration. For most of this time, the executives at their parent company left them alone, and this independence allowed them to ignore the macro trends in legacy media — including its disastrous pivot to Facebook video — and focus solely on creating longform YouTube videos.

Vox’s YouTube output not only inspired thousands of other channels, but also launched the careers of some of the most admired independent video journalists on the platform. Johnny Harris now has 6.6 million subscribers and employs a team of over 20 people, and he’s merely the first of several former Vox employees who went on to enjoy immense success after leaving the company.

So what was the secret sauce at Vox that led to it outshining all its peers? That’s the question I sought out to answer.

Building a jack-of-all-trades video team

Vox’s YouTube channel can trace its origins back to an “unconference,” which was a silly word we used in the early 2010s to describe what was really just an industry networking event. It was called Newsfoo, and in the fall of 2013 it was attended by all sorts of up-and-coming thinkers in the media space and sponsored by organizations like Google and the Knight Foundation.

By that point, Joe Posner was going through a bit of a career pivot; he had spent a few years as an animator for traditional documentaries, the kind that go to festivals like Tribeca or Sundance, but he’d grown frustrated by how difficult it was to get those sorts of film projects off the ground. “I recognized that if I wanted to make things of my own I needed to sort of make my own work without anybody spending money on it,” he told me recently.

Posner settled on a format that he referred to as “animated opinion essay.” Basically, it involves filming a subject-matter expert talking about a specific topic and then overlaying that footage with animations and other visual flourishes to illustrate the expert’s key points. In 2010, for instance, he filmed Brown economics professor Mark Blyth explaining the austerity policies embraced by Europe, and the finished product is interspersed with simple whiteboard animations and sound effects that mostly reflect what Blyth is saying at any given moment. Despite the boring title (“Mark Blyth on Austerity”), the video currently has 180,000 views.

The success of those early videos led to media outlets like Marketplace and the Daily Beast commissioning Posner to develop series for their channels. That’s how he ended up sending an interview request to Ezra Klein, who was then running the Wonkblog team at the Washington Post. “He was like, ‘I don't think the Washington Post is going to let me do a Daily Beast video,’” he recalled. But Klein ended up coming to that 2013 Newsfoo event and by that point was familiar with Posner’s work. “I didn’t know he was quitting [his Washington Post job] yet, but he knew he was.’”

Earlier that year, Klein had pitched the Washington Post higher-ups on funding a new explainer journalism site that he would helm, and they’d passed on the project. At some point later, he, Matt Yglesias, and Melissa Bell convinced Vox Media to finance the idea, and in April 2014 they launched Vox.com. Klein was appointed editor-in-chief and initially able to hire about 20 people.

Klein had stayed in touch with Posner since Newsfoo and told the filmmaker that he’d probably call about six months after Vox’s launch to hire him. “And then the next call after that was, ‘actually, can you go meet with people tomorrow and start next week?’” General Electric had signed on to sponsor some initial videos. “That’s always the start of a good media story,” Posner joked. “They sold some ads.”

Those first few videos weren’t exactly groundbreaking. Shot in the Vox offices, they basically show Klein interviewing some wonky expert for less than 20 minutes. Posner’s animations appear in the first 60 seconds or so of the video before it transitions into a traditional Q&A format. Other early videos utilized Posner’s animated opinion essay approach to spruce up videos of Klein reading from a teleprompter.

Posner is the first to acknowledge these early videos weren’t spectacular, but up until then he had operated mainly as a 1099 freelancer, which meant his work was limited in its scope. This new full-time role provided him the runway of trying out new formats and storytelling techniques, but it would take time to develop them. “They did give us a lot of freedom,” he said, “and I saw it as my mission to experiment and evolve.” At first, Posner was doing nearly all the work of populating Vox’s YouTube channel and only had occasional help from the odd freelancer, but eventually his bosses gave him the budget to hire more people, and this just happened to be around the time he received an email from Joss Fong.

Like many of the people Posner ended up hiring, Fong didn’t have a deep background in producing video. She’d been hired out of college to work at Media Matters for America, the leftwing media watchdog group that spends most of its time monitoring the insanity emanating from rightwing news outlets. Fong started off listening to Rush Limbaugh broadcasts and eventually graduated to Fox & Friends. “I spent four years there and I learned a lot, but ultimately got pretty burnt out on politics,” she told me last year. “I decided I wanted to cover science instead.”

She enrolled in grad school at NYU, initially focusing on written science journalism — the idea being that she would eventually write for magazines. “And then I just realized in grad school that writing is kind of a bummer, and I would just agonize over every sentence,” she recalled. “I just thought so many people were already really good at writing.” So part way through she switched her focus to video and started pursuing internships that would help her develop those skills.

Prior to the launch of Vox, she had been a big fan of Yglesias and Klein’s wonky explainer journalism, so when she found out they were building something together she knew immediately where she wanted to land after grad school. “I was, like, I got to be there.” Posner remembers one day receiving a cold email from her out of the blue. “Her passion and specific background and ambitions stood in pretty stark contrast to the hundreds of TV experience resumes that came through the other way,” he recalled. He hired her in June, only two months after Vox’s launch.

Technically, Fong’s role was “multimedia producer,” and the job involved tasks like making the charts that were embedded in Vox articles. In fact, in those early days the YouTube channel was still very much tied to what was being written on the website. Posner and Fong would pull a writer aside to interview them about one of their latest pieces and then edit their answers into a narrative, visual-rich video.

This produced all sorts of creative bottlenecks. For one, the writers were being judged by their bosses on how many articles they were writing — not their video output. Fong felt guilty whenever she had to pull a writer away from their work to record. The other problem was that many Vox articles just didn’t translate well to video; one of the governing philosophies Posner settled on very early was that you should only tell a story through video if it had elements that were distinctly visual. Simply slapping some b-roll and stock photography on top of narration didn’t cut it.

In August, Posner left on a long-delayed honeymoon, and he points to that absence as the reason Fong was able to push the YouTube channel into a whole new direction. “Me leaving was a really positive thing in guaranteeing the independence that she needed to produce her first big hit.”

By then, Fong had grown pretty frustrated with the video pipeline. “At some point, I don't know exactly how, but it became clear to me that video requires a different kind of thinking,” she said. “And the writers and the newsroom were not only going to be a bottleneck on our production process, but also our imagination for video, and we weren't going to get much traction.” So she started researching and writing her own scripts, and only pulled the Vox writers in to actually narrate those scripts into a microphone. “At this point it wasn't clear to us that the video producers had the authority to put our own voices into the pieces, so it was always like, okay, how can I get a writer to do this piece with me?”

In August 2014, Fong uploaded a roughly three minute video titled, “Does Megalodon still exist? Shark Week debunked.” Narrated by a science writer named Joseph Stromberg, it adhered perfectly to Posner’s edict for visual storytelling; not only was there plenty of Shark Week footage to use, but Fong spliced it with her own animations and charts to buttress the arguments being made in the narration. The video quickly rose to the top of Reddit’s r/videos and became Vox’s first truly viral piece. “I was just coming back from my honeymoon when that video came out and it was a game changer,” said Posner.

It was soon after that when Vox executives started letting the video team operate independently from the website. “They really left us alone and allowed us to grow, basically,” said Fong. “There was very little interference from the newsroom; they were happy to collaborate with us when that made sense, but they were also happy to let us do our thing. And there's just no way that Vox's [YouTube] success would have happened without that kind of trust.”

Over time, Vox’s video staff grew more emboldened to begin pitching and narrating their own videos, and, because their output didn’t always need to be tied to the news cycle, they had room to experiment with more ambitious storytelling. Each new video pushed the envelope in terms of inventing a new form of explainer journalism that until then had never been found on YouTube.

Perhaps nobody represents this evolution better than Estelle Caswell. I actually interviewed Caswell in 2018 for an article I never ended up writing, and she told me she had gone to film school in LA with the goal of becoming a traditional filmmaker. “I quickly realized I hated working on sets, and that was kind of the track everyone went on — [production assistant] to production coordinator to maybe producer or director. It was just too long of a strategy for me. I was like, ‘I need to be creative immediately.’”

There’s at least one industry that allows you to start pumping out creative work on a much faster timeline: advertising. In 2012, Caswell took a job as a motion graphics designer at a DC-based PR firm called APCO Worldwide. As the only person at the company with this particular skill set, she was able to work across dozens of clients and build up a baseline of expertise very quickly. “After two years there, I realized that I was a service desk, basically; I was being creative at the whims of the client; and that kind of destroyed me a little bit, but it was super fun at the time.”

Caswell didn’t consider herself part of the DC media culture and was completely unaware of Vox when it launched in 2014. It was a coworker who recommended she apply. Initially, Posner hired her as just a freelancer — she continued her job at APCO and edited Vox videos at night — but she came on full time by that August.

Upon starting, Caswell was plugged into Vox’s production process where she’d interview the writers about their articles and then attempt to translate those recordings into engaging videos. But as the team became more emboldened in pursuing its own story ideas, she began pitching completely original video concepts, many of which were on the topic of music. In 2016, for instance, she produced a video titled “Rapping, deconstructed: The best rhymers of all time.” The first thing that strikes you while watching it is how distinctly visual it is, in that nearly every concept is paired with Caswell’s animations. When a song is playing, it’s not merely expressed through pulsing soundwaves, but also an illustrated audio mixer with dials spinning. The rap lyrics are color coded and synced perfectly with the music, and Caswell’s narration and interviews are seamlessly interwoven between each musical demonstration. The video is 12 minutes and 43 seconds long, and there’s not an ounce of fat on it. “She's an incredibly amazing animator, in part because she's able to get across ideas in a very efficient way visually,” said Posner. To date, it’s generated over 15 million views.

In early 2017, Caswell sat down with Posner and Fong to discuss what she wanted to accomplish in the next year. “They realized I was pitching a lot of music videos, and those were doing really well,” she said. “And they were like, ok, you can do one-offs for the rest of the year – pitch whatever you want every couple of weeks and make that happen — or you can really frontload a lot of pre-production and research and interviewing and build an entire series on music. I was like, I want to do that one.”

That series was called Earworm, and over the next few years it put out some of the best video journalism ever to be uploaded to YouTube.

The crown jewel in this series, in my opinion, is called “The most feared song in jazz, explained.” The topic presented Caswell with a figurative mountain she needed to climb, in that she had to explain the music theory behind jazz, even though she didn’t even understand it herself going into it. To tackle this feat, she frontloaded her research with primary source interviews — in this case with two musicians named Braxton Cook and Adam Neely. In the span of only 10 minutes, she layers their interviews with illustrations, custom props, notated sheet music, stop animation, narration, archival footage, and seamless audio transitions to wrestle a bunch of abstract music theory into this very concrete takeaway: that John Coltrane was a jazz prodigy who forever altered the course of the genre. The video, upon completion, instantaneously engenders jealousy for any journalist who watches it. It should be taught in every broadcast journalism curriculum.

In my interviews, I kept coming back to this question of why Vox’s video output was so different from its competitors. What was it about the company’s production process that allowed it to push the boundaries of what was then possible on YouTube?

According to Fong, its creativity was rooted in its scrappiness. “We kind of pushed aside the typical assembly line model of making video,” she said. “We brought people on and were just like, well, you have to do it all. That's just how we work. You're going to learn After Effects” — a popular motion graphics software — “You're going to edit your own videos and you're going to pitch and write your stories. And so it's maybe not the most efficient or cost-effective way of making videos, but in the end, we ended up with a team of people who are a little bit ‘jack of all trades’ types.” This allowed individual team members to spearhead their own projects and push them to the finish line. “If I had any secret sauce,” said Posner, “it was always that it was like, whatever you're doing is going to be as much yours as I can possibly make it. I believed in our voices and our creativity being the main reasons why an audience will care. If you don't care first, if you're not obsessed first, if you don't show that passion first, they won't have it either.”

In the early years, new team members simply learned through a kind of osmosis where they shadowed their colleagues through the production process and then buttressed their skill sets with online tutorials when necessary. At some point, however, the team reached a size where Fong felt the need to impose more editorial structure. “I became kind of the editorial person where I would look at every script and try to formulate a style of video writing that we would focus on,” she said. She eventually devised a training curriculum on how to craft an explainer video. “I would [go to a team member and] say, ‘hey, I really like the way you edit the music in your videos. Can you make like a four minute video tutorial that we would just have on hand for people that we hire?’”

Posner prided himself on hiring people who didn’t always have deep video experience, and for them the learning curve could be steep. When Phil Edwards joined Vox in 2015, for instance, he was initially part of the website writing staff. “At the time, my business card said ‘ephemera correspondent’ on it,” he told me. “So I was basically just writing random things that touched on the news that seemed interesting, or diving into historical stuff like why presidents started wearing pants.”

Edwards wasn’t at Vox for very long before he started getting frustrated with the daily deadlines for the writing staff — it was generally expected that he produce at least two written pieces a day — and he’d noticed that the video team had much more flexible timelines for producing content. At some point, Fong interviewed him for a video about how pigeons delivered messages to the troops during both world wars, and he enjoyed the collaboration. From there, he started moonlighting as a scriptwriter, helping Caswell craft a few of her videos. “And then I think after that they probably had some mandate from above to expand the team,” he recalled. “And so they just were like, ‘hey, you seem good. You want to do scripts?’”

Of course, as previously discussed, no member of the video team focused on just one thing, and Edwards threw himself into learning all the other skills needed to make good videos. “There wasn't a training,” he said. “There wasn't a mandate. It was just me watching tutorials. I mean, I've watched tutorials that are like ‘how to make maps like Vox’ while I'm working at Vox to learn how to make maps, which is a very funny thing to happen. I literally didn't know how to operate a camera at the beginning; Johnny Harris taught me how to open a lens.”

I asked Edwards when he’d reached the point of the learning curve where he could creatively touch every part of the video. He pointed to a December 2015 piece titled “The World War II meme that circled the world.” It explains the origin of the “Killroy was here” meme that soldiers drew on buildings as they traveled across Europe, and it combines Edwards’ narration with archive footage and original animations. “It’s a video that would completely flop today, but it was a big hit at the time, which brought me a lot of confidence.”

It seemed pretty clear to me that Vox’s learn-by-osmosis approach to video making played an important role in its creative evolution, but I think another factor was the team’s ability to ignore the trends sweeping through the rest of the industry — namely its disastrous pivot to Facebook video. Fong remembers there were rumblings from higher ups about whether there should be more attention to Facebook, but from the very beginning she was skeptical as to whether the platform could produce any real value. “It was just obvious to anyone who actually cares about video that those views are fake, that Facebook was not a video destination for people,” she said. “And so we were able to convince the company to let us continue to focus on YouTube and not get too distracted by these giant fake numbers. That was a bullet that we were able to dodge.”

As for why Vox Media executives were giving the video team so much autonomy, that part is less clear. For the first few years of the YouTube channel’s existence, Vox’s channel was mostly unmonetized beyond YouTube’s ad share, which likely didn’t generate anywhere close to the amount of revenue needed to cover the high production costs. This was an era when venture capitalists were still throwing heaps of cash at companies like Vox, Vice, and Buzzfeed, so maybe the simple answer for why they didn’t try to monetize the channel was that they didn’t need to.

Either way, Vox video did eventually settle on a business model of sorts, one that was dependent on another media bubble of that era: TV streaming. Netflix’s runaway stock price had spurred every other Hollywood conglomerate into spending billions of dollars to build out the content offerings of their own streaming apps, and suddenly news media companies like Conde Nast and Vox were spinning up in-house production studios to pitch docuseries and movies based on their IP.

In 2018, Netflix debuted a Vox-produced show called Explained. “They got the show and then it was like, oh my God, we have a Netflix show, are we going to be able to work on it?” said Fong. “I think we felt a lot of ownership for the explainer format that we had developed and we wanted to be part of it.” By then, Vox’s video division had grown to a few dozen people, and while the show was heavily staffed with TV veterans, Posner ensured that individual team members could be rotated in to work on specific episodes.

In our interview, I suggested to Fong that this show could have provided an opportunity to escape the ghettos of digital video to launch her career in prestige TV, but she didn’t seem tempted by the prospect. “I did not come out of that experience thinking that that was a better way to spend my time,” she said. “I don't like big productions. I think that there are way too many cooks in the kitchen. They are slow. They fly people around and I don't like flying unnecessarily. They're using tons of resources for something that is not really better than a YouTube video in my experience. So I think that I came out of that thinking, wow, that was really cool, and I'm really proud of us for having the show, but I don't necessarily want to do more [TV work] because I think I can do something faster, maybe more creative just on YouTube for free.”

Fong wasn’t the only one on Vox’s video staff to believe that the style of visual storytelling it pioneered seemed uniquely designed for YouTube. The problem was that the parent company didn’t seem interested in finding a business model that could sustain its YouTube journalism. To accomplish that feat, Fong and her colleagues would have to decamp and launch their own independent channels.

Someone just needed to make the first leap.

The exodus begins

Very early on in Joe Posner’s career at Vox, he adopted the philosophy that a passion for video making could trump any formal training in the medium, and Johnny Harris was pretty much the embodiment of that ethos.

In a video published to his YouTube channel, Harris traced his interest in visual storytelling to a video camera his parents owned when he was a kid. “When I was in high school, I would take this video camera out and make the weirdest, most horrendous looking short films you could ever imagine,” he said. “This stuff had no body. It had no use. It was ugly and storyless and just really weird. But what it did was it started to hone a sense of me looking through a camera, pressing record, and then going and editing images together. And I did it a lot.”

This interest carried over into college, where Harris planned to major in film. But during his freshman Intro to Film course, he noticed the syllabus was focused on film theory and contained nothing related to actually making stuff. During the second week of the course, he raised his hand and asked when they’d get to make a movie. “And they're like, ‘oh, you do that in the fourth year. In one class, you get to make a movie.’ And I remember just being so disappointed. Like, wait, what? That's what film school is?” After that, Harris switched his major to international relations and pretty much abandoned any hope of pursuing a film career.

It was his college girlfriend Iz who helped steer him back toward video. At some point during their relationship they started nerding out about cameras and decided they wanted to purchase a really nice one — a Canon 7D. As Iz recently recounted in a podcast interview, they bought the camera with a credit card and then paid it off by both donating their plasma. “If you did both arms, you could get $45, and so we'd get 90 bucks between us. You could go once a week, so we went once a week. We paid the credit card off. We had our Canon 7D, and we learned how to shoot with it.”

Iz and Johnny were both Mormon and going to school in Utah, which has one of the highest marriage rates in the nation. Armed with their new camera, they started shooting weddings, which gave them the opportunity to develop their photography skills. And since the Canon also shoots video, they used it to document their own lives, producing what would almost be considered proto vlogs. In that podcast interview, Iz recalled that one night they were lying in bed together looking at their footage. “And I was like, ‘we're a lot better at video … We're going to stop this photography thing. We're just okay at that.’ And he was like, ‘yeah.’”

In the span of one week in April 2013, the two graduated from college and Iz gave birth to their first child. With no jobs lined up and only $1,300 in their bank account, they moved across the country to Washington, DC. Johnny had his degree in international relations and assumed he’d somehow end up working in diplomacy, but the competition in that field was fierce. That $1,300 was actually a research grant for a trip to Peru, and it was while there he decided to pivot to a career in video. At this point, he didn’t have much in the way of a portfolio — basically some stitched-together home videos. “I cobbled together all of the work I possibly could,” he recounted in a video about how he got his job at Vox. “All of the dummy projects, all of the stuff that looked at all decent, and I put it onto a portfolio website that I built with a basic WordPress template, and I started to apply to jobs.”

After a few months of working in restaurants to make ends meet, Harris landed a role making videos for an architecture regulation firm. “None of it had anything to do with what I'd studied, nothing that I was interested in, but the key component here is that they were paying me for 40 hours a week to sit down and to make stuff in After Effects,” he said. This was the education he’d longed for when he enrolled in that Intro to Film course years before. Over the next eight months, he built out a real portfolio and then used it to get a job at an actual think tank that focused on international affairs. “And again, was this my dream job? Was this what I wanted to be doing for the rest of my life? No.” It was a stepping stone, one that allowed him to spend long hours pouring himself into every aspect of video production, focusing especially on animation and map-making.

But a stepping stone to what? Harris learned the answer to that question in April 2014 when he stumbled across an animated Vox video about healthcare — probably this one on how single payer healthcare works — and upon finishing it declared out loud to an empty room, “I will work for these people.” He doubled down on honing his animation skills and then applied for an animator position there a few months later. “I got rejected,” he recalled. “I wasn't good enough at that time.”

He was distraught but undeterred. That Thanksgiving he had the lightbulb idea of creating a video pitching Vox for why it should hire him. “Over that Thanksgiving break, I poured my soul into making that video,” he said. “I called it my video resume and it was like the five reasons I would be an asset to your team.” When he got back to DC he emailed it to Posner, who responded almost immediately. That set off a series of conversations that led to Harris joining the team in early 2015.

Harris was only a few months into his tenure at Vox when he pitched his bosses on a trip to Cuba. “I was into it because I had known this was coming since he applied,” Posner told me. “So I was very excited that he was sort of ready to try to make this happen and had a really ambitious idea.” Up until then, Vox’s videos had been produced almost entirely at the company’s offices; if a journalist interviewed a source, it was either in the studio or via a video phone call. Harris’s Cuba videos, on the other hand, were completely immersive, with Harris interviewing Cubans on the streets of Havana and in their own homes. That one trip yielded three videos, with the most popular one generating over 9 million views, well above Vox’s average at that time.

After that, it became easier and easier for Harris to pitch on-location videos. In 2016, for instance, he traveled to Rio de Janeiro to report on the slums Brazil was hiding from foreigners who traveled there for the Olympics, and he followed that up with another video set in the city about a month later. But travel reporting didn’t become his full time job until 2017 with the launch of Borders.

Unlike his one-off videos, Borders was its own branded series that nonetheless was still uploaded to Vox’s main YouTube channel. The MO seemed to be that he would travel to a region, collect a bunch of footage and interviews, and then return to craft an entire season of pieces. Each video was on a self-contained topic and could therefore be watched out of order. While it wasn’t uncommon by that point for Vox journalists to appear on camera, Harris was the central character in all his videos and began to amass his own personal fanbase. He claimed in a recent podcast interview that Borders was Vox’s most popular series during its run from 2017 to early 2020.

Harris launched his personal YouTube channel in 2018, about a year after the debut of Borders. As far as I know, he was among the first employees on the Vox video staff to do so, and this was definitely during a time when outlets still weren’t used to their employees operating their own media ventures. BuzzFeed had famously banned its staffers from appearing in outside videos, and in 2021 the New York Times issued a policy that journalists had to get approval before launching personal newsletters. Even some at Vox Media seemed uncomfortable with this sort of dynamic; in 2024, a former Verge staffer revealed she had been warned by her bosses that “at any point in time, they could make me take down any videos they wanted.” Posner told me via email that Harris had switched from full-time status to a freelance contractor position. “I wasn't directly responsible for what was in that contract, but I felt it was very important to support people's entrepreneurial spirit.”

Over the next year, Harris uploaded more than a dozen videos. At first, he stuck mainly to personal vlogs on topics like how he got his job at Vox and what it’s like to be dyslexic (many of the biographical details I included in this piece were gleaned from these videos). Eventually, though, he started covering topics that could have just as easily fit within Vox’s YouTube channel. In September 2019, for instance, he uploaded one about how the Dutch used its canal system to reclaim land from the ocean. Two months later, he explained why the UK is at the center of every modern map. In February 2020, he published his most ambitious and longest video to that date: an 18-minute explainer for why so many delusional people think the earth is flat. That one went mega viral, eventually racking up 13 million views.

Harris’s timing couldn’t have been more perfect; a mere month later the pandemic shutdown closed off most international travel, and he had little more to do other than sit at home and make videos for his personal channel. Pretty quickly, he went from uploading videos sporadically to publishing new ones roughly every week.

It was around this time that I went from vaguely knowing who Harris was to becoming what could be considered a hardcore fan. Part of it had to do with the fact that I too suddenly had a lot more free time on my hands and could spend it watching long YouTube videos, but the media geek in me was also fascinated with how Harris was doing so much with so little. He was just a guy broadcasting from his house somewhere in Washington, DC, and yet he was producing these fully-formed documentaries that looked just as good as anything you’d watch on Netflix or the Travel Channel.

The one that really hooked me was titled “How I Took a Picture of a Galaxy.” It starts with grainy, badly-lit cell phone footage of Harris. “Ok wait, I have a question that is on my mind, and I can’t stop thinking about it. Is it possible to take a picture of another galaxy?” Not from a NASA-grade telescope, he elaborated, but from a Washington, DC backyard that’s awash in light pollution. “That would be crazy.”

Spoiler alert: it is possible, but nothing close to easy. We watch the question transform into an obsession for Harris, and he deftly edits months of trial and error as he stumbles from one revelation to the next. At one point he introduces an animation of a ball rolling down a deep crevice to explain the difficulty of learning a new skill, and he regularly interrupts the video with more grainy cell phone footage of himself expressing frustration at his many failures. By the time I reached the climax of the video — where he reveals his photos of a galaxy located 21 million light years away — I was emotionally invested in an outcome I didn’t give two shits about merely 20 minutes ago. It felt to me like this great leap forward for YouTube that it was hosting something so cinematic and original. I hadn’t felt this way since stumbling across Casey Neistat’s daily vlog nearly a half decade before.

By the time Harris uploaded his “VOX BORDERS IS CANCELED” video a few months later, he had secured his life raft, and, outside of a few collaborations with the New York Times, from there forward he put all his focus into building an independent media company. Over time, his videos have gotten more ambitious, with some requiring months of investigative research and trips across the globe. Today, he’s one of the most widely respected journalists on YouTube, and his channel is quickly approaching a billion views.

This success wasn’t Harris’s alone; he’s now supported by a team of producers, animators, editors, and even a full-time music composer. And his ability to scale up these operations was entirely dependent on the behind-the-scenes work of his wife Iz.

In a recent podcast interview, Johnny explained that it was actually Iz who gave him the idea to start his own YouTube account by launching her own first. It was a travel and lifestyle channel that found an audience surprisingly quickly, eventually amassing over 200,000 subscribers. And while Johnny approached his videos as a lone wolf — handling all the shooting and editing on his own — Iz sought to operationalize her production. “When she had like 10,000 subscribers, she was hiring people,” Johnny recalled. “And I was just starting to dabble with my own YouTube channel. And I was like, you're hiring people? Like, how are you doing this? And she's like, yeah, I'm hiring people. We have a process here. We have project management for my videos.”

In an alternate timeline, Iz would have ended up just as famous as her husband, but instead she decided to wind down her channel just as Johnny’s was picking up real momentum, mainly because she grew disillusioned with how her on-camera persona was starting to distort her off-camera life. “We were genuinely living an interesting life, and then we were capturing that life,” she explained. “And then we were putting that life out to people, right? … And like suddenly you're starting to live an interesting life just so you can capture it.” She didn’t like that the YouTube channel had become the tail that wagged the dog.

Upon ending her channel, Iz immediately transitioned to working on Johnny’s full-time, serving essentially as his executive producer. “I was a scrappy one-man band, and she just brought [her team] over and started to orchestrate around me,” said Johnny. Not only did Iz take over every level of his production, but she ran the entire business side of the channel, which included everything from vetting sponsors to handling payroll. As the channel gained more subscribers and grew in revenue, she was able to keep hiring more and more team members to help scale it further.

Eventually, though, both Iz and Johnny landed on a pretty harsh realization: that you can only scale a personal brand so far. In the attempt to maintain a weekly output of videos, Johnny found himself working on topics that didn’t really interest him. “We'd be like six months into a story and near to publishing it, and I would just turn to him and be like, you hate this story,” Iz recalled in a podcast interview. “I know you hate this story. It is like pulling teeth, getting you to go through this story. So why did you say yes? Why did you greenlight it? Why did you let someone put this forward?”

This revelation caused them to upend their production process in a way that dialed Johnny’s output back to only two videos per month. But that didn’t mean giving up on scaling the company; instead, they decided what they really needed was to bring more Johnnys into the fold. Luckily for them, there was already another company responsible for printing up more Johnnys: Vox.

In 2023, Johnny announced the launch of Search Party, a separate channel that would be helmed by Sam Ellis, one of his former coworkers at Vox. The way it worked was Ellis would be able to pursue his own stories while leaning on the operationalized infrastructure that Iz had erected. “They have a full project management team,” she explained. “They have thumbnail designers at their disposal.” Johnny and Iz own the channel while Ellis is paid a salary and benefits, plus a “generous rev share over time as the channel scales,” as Iz put it.

As of this writing, Search Party has grown to 710,000 subscribers, and it’s enough of a success that Johnny and Iz decided to change the name of their company to New Press and lean into building a creator network. The idea is to grow it to around eight creator-led independent channels. “Those creators will have very small teams that they creatively manage, but operationally and project management-wise, they do not,” said Iz. In late 2024 they launched a third channel with Christophe Haubursin, who, as you’ve probably guessed, used to work with Johnny at Vox.

Of course, not all the independent creators who came out of Vox built their brands under the New Press umbrella. In 2022, a former Vox producer named Cleo Abram announced she was launching her own channel, and it’s since grown to over 6 million subscribers — almost the size of Harris’s.

As with Phil Edwards, Abram’s entry into Vox had nothing to do with video; she was actually hired onto the marketing division at Vox Media, which is the parent company of Vox.com. Eventually she ended up working under Andrew Golis, who was the GM at Vox when it started selling various shows to Hollywood streaming services. In her new role, Abram worked with Vox’s video team to generate story ideas and package them into pitches, and together they successfully sold the Explained series to Netflix. “It was so exciting,” she recalled on a podcast interview. “For like 10 seconds I was happy, and then immediately I was very sad. And I was like, what? Why do I feel like this? And it was because the show that I had persuaded myself that I was creatively helping with was immediately going to be given to people who actually had a job of doing video journalism and actually could produce video and were going to go make the show … And that felt devastating to me.”

The disappointment lit a fire under her, and Abram started attending night classes to learn how to edit and animate videos with tools like Premiere Pro and After Effects. She also pitched in to help on videos for Racked, which was then a fashion vertical owned by Vox Media. “I was still technically on the development team, and everybody was sort of pretending like that wasn't happening.”

One day Posner sent out an email to Vox’s video listserv soliciting story ideas for Explained’s second season. The email promised that anyone whose idea was greenlit would get to produce that episode. “I knew that this email was not meant for me,” she said. “He thought that he was talking to the video journalists at Vox. But technically, I had gotten the email, and so I wrote up several pitches … One of them ended up on some list that made its way through Vox and ended up getting greenlit by Netflix … And when they looked back at who had pitched these ideas, to Joe Posner's credit, he did not take it away from me. He did not say, ‘I didn't mean you. I meant all of these professional video journalists who are working on Vox.’ And basically, the rest of my career is thanks to the fact that I pitched it and he didn't take it away from me.”

That decision led to Abram fully joining the Vox video team, and when she wasn’t working on the Netflix series she pitched and produced her own YouTube videos for the channel. In early 2020, the YouTube Originals program funded a show hosted by Abram called Glad You Asked. A year later, she produced an episode for the series where she explored the data and science around whether having kids makes us happy. To promote the episode, she posted a clip to her personal TikTok account. “I started to look at the comments as they were coming in,” she recalled in a podcast interview. “And I remember the first one that I saw was, ‘oh, this is interesting, but I can't have kids because the world is getting worse.’ And I clicked on who it was, and it was like some teenage girl account on TikTok, and more and more comments started coming in. I began to realize that a lot of them had this same tone …. It was pretty shocking because tens of thousands of young people commented on these videos saying that they thought the future was getting worse and that there was nothing that they could do about it.”

Abram understood their perspective, but she didn’t have this same worldview. “I began to have this idea for a show that would explicitly say, ‘here are the ways in which humans have done an incredible job. We're so lucky to be alive right now.’” In early 2022, she officially launched her personal channel with a video titled “Why I left Vox.” In it, she committed to pursuing stories that were “journalistically rigorous, genuinely optimistic explanations about technology — like Black Mirror, but the opposite.”

Unlike Harris, who shot and produced his videos mainly from his home studio — with some exceptions — Abram’s journalism was completely immersive, with her traveling all over the world to interview the scientists on the forefront of technological breakthroughs. In her video on enhanced running shoes that are banned at the Olympics, for instance, she visited Nike’s famed test lab in Oregon, where its top researchers allowed her to saw shoes in half so she could show viewers what made them so effective. Her most impressive video, for my money, involved flying to Geneva to see the large particle accelerator maintained by CERN, an organization funded by multiple European countries. Watching the piece, it’s easy to see Vox’s DNA imbued into every aspect of the video — the conversational-yet-information-dense narration, the illustrative animations, the sound design. In Abram’s interview with the Colin & Samir podcast, Colin Rosenblum marveled at how such an esoteric topic could be rendered so gripping. “I remember thinking this is going to bomb,” he said. “Like Cleo's lost it. This one's not going to work. And then you click through and it's like this incredibly dense amount of information … You constantly put out videos that I look at and I'm like, ‘there's no way millions of people are interested in the subject matter.’ And then they are.’”

Like Harris, Abram eventually amassed a team of journalists, fact checkers, and animators to help produce her videos, but some of the Vox diaspora who left to launch their own channels stuck with a more scrappy approach — one that leveraged the jack-of-all-trades skill set they built at Vox.

Phil Edwards published the first video to his personal channel in late 2020, when he was still employed by Vox. “Seeing that they let Johnny Harris do his channel for a while on the side made me think that I wouldn't immediately get fired for doing it,” he told me. For the first few years, he used it to pursue stories that didn’t fit well on the Vox channel, and his following grew at a fairly rapid clip. He knew he eventually wanted to follow in Harris’s footsteps and go independent, but was unsure of the timing. “I would have these long walks with my wife and I'd be like, all right, when I have a hundred thousand subscribers, then I will quit. And that day came and went and I was like, no, let's not quit. I really wanted to hold on as long as possible.”

Edwards finally made the jump to full independence in late 2023. Many of his former coworkers had left by that point, and he’d learned that Vox planned to shrink the video team. “It just felt like some of that magic was kind of leaving in some ways.” He’d grown the channel to about 250,000 subscribers, and the cost of living was fairly low in Richmond, where he’d moved with his family in 2018.

When I spoke to him in December, he’d been on his own for about a year, and he seemed somewhat ambivalent about his progress. “Being a creator is a slog,” he said. “I'll probably roughly equal my compensation from last year. depending on how you count it, which in some respects is great, but it's a lot more work.” Without Vox’s infrastructure to fall back on, he not only needs to handle every aspect of producing videos, but also take on all the administrative task work of running his own business. “There are no good days; there are just highs and lows.” Since leaving Vox, he’s grown the channel to over 400,000 subscribers — an impressive feat, for sure, but still a far ways off from the scale achieved by Harris and Abram. “I take some solace when I kind of zoom out and just try to look at the numbers in a more rational statistical way. This is my first year going, and I've doubled my revenue and I’m able to pay myself now. That’s good. You should be happy, Philip. I look at the views or the subscriber chart and I'm like, all right, we're growing X percent. Just stay the course, just keep going. But it is really hard.”

The last of the old guard

In late 2022, Joe Posner left Vox to run the video team at Semafor. According to her LinkedIn profile, Estelle Caswell departed a month later. Of that original cohort who built Vox’s early YouTube presence, only Joss Fong remained. “I'm a team player and I was a real company girl,” she told me.

But that’s not to say Fong was content with staying in the same role. At one point, she and a colleague named Adam Cole pitched the executives at Vox on launching a separate channel where they’d adopt the role of aliens who were exploring the planet for the first time. They tried to use Snapchat filters as a simple way of changing their features, but it didn’t quite work. “That's probably why [the Vox executives] were like, ‘I don't know if this is the move for us right now,’” Fong said. In fact, Vox announced in late 2023 it was laying off half the video team. “That was when I decided to leave. It was just clear that the era of Vox video was coming to a close, and by that I mean the era where the video team was going to be allowed to do what we wanted.”

While the aliens idea didn’t work out, Fong did enjoy collaborating with Cole, and the two decided to launch an independent channel together. Prior to his work with Vox, Cole had run a science YouTube channel for NPR called Skunk Bear, and he actually met Posner at the very same Newsfoo “unconference” where Posner met Ezra Klein. When Vox sold the Explained show to Netflix, Posner approached Cole about working on it, and he ended up producing about 10 episodes spanning across multiple seasons. “When I finished with that, I was pretty burnt out because it was very intense,” Cole told me. “I started freelancing and working a lot less, and during that time, I mostly was freelancing for Vox.” Fong was Cole’s editor on all of those videos.

Cole and Fong could have simply launched a science explainer channel, one not dissimilar to Cleo Abram’s, but they settled on a more specific mission, which was to explain the methods scientists and other experts used to reach their conclusions. The idea, per Fong, was “to really laser focus in on evidence literacy — the how and not the what of research.” They called the channel Howtown, and for those first few episodes uploaded in mid-2024 they solicited questions from well-known education YouTubers. Abram asked how scientists know dogs are color blind. Hank Green asked how epidemiologists counted Covid deaths. Simone Giertz asked how we measure the Earth’s circumference. “We wanted to start with those faces because they're already so big on YouTube,” said Fong.

After those initial videos, Fong and Cole focused on building an onscreen rapport with each other, and to accomplish that they settled on a format that had already been perfected by podcasts like Radiolab and Reply All, wherein one host would serve as the expert on a particular topic while the other played the part of the layman. The expert spends weeks diving into the primary research and conducting interviews, and then, once they’ve mastered the subject matter, they sit down to tell the layman what they learned. “The other person genuinely doesn't really know the topic at all, and they kind of try to serve as a proxy for the viewer who might be confused at parts that get a little technical,” said Fong. The goal was for both of them to play the expert for one video per month so that they could publish a new episode roughly every other week.

Fong actually reached out to me prior to the launch of Howtown to seek my advice on business models, and I jumped on the phone with her and Cole to discuss potential strategies for their Patreon account. I don’t remember what advice I gave them and so have no idea whether they took it, but I was excited to follow along as they built their channel. I checked in by email with Fong a few months into their journey to see how things were going. “By subscribers we're doing about what we hoped,” she replied. “But views are a different story — we're really fighting for every one.” By that point they were at about 55,000 subscribers — impressive but still a far cry from where they needed to be.

I knew Howtown’s success was a foregone conclusion, but even I was shocked when I looked a month later and saw it had grown to over 300,000 subscribers. I clicked over to their video tab, and while they were pulling in respectable numbers, their view counts weren’t high enough to explain such explosive growth. Then I switched over to the Shorts tab, and it became immediately clear what had happened. Fong and Cole were adapting their longform pieces into short vertical videos that pulled in absolutely monster viewership. As of this writing, 25 of their Shorts have generated north of a million views, with the most popular video topping out at 44 million. As each Short hit the viral jackpot, the channel saw a huge spike in followers, and this helped push Howtown above 800,000 subscribers by its first anniversary.

They had blown past their subscriber goal, so imagine my surprise when both expressed ambivalence about their success. “It's giving me this spidey sense of red flags,” Fong told me. “And I don't know why, maybe I'm just afraid that I don't like things to be easy, but I don't think those subscribers are signing up to watch our 15-minute features diving into a literature review on some area of science.” The YouTube homepage has always been governed by algorithms, but there’s at least some level of optionality to it; you’re presented with a display of thumbnails and headlines, and ultimately it’s up to you to decide what you want to watch. Shorts, on the other hand, is just so much more passive, with viewers handing almost complete control to the algorithm. “There's a real dopamine hit. To make something in a day and get 20 million views, that's crazy. And seeing the big number go up feels good. But I'm having flashbacks to the Facebook days and thinking, like, I don't know what's behind this.”

Cole seemed really fearful that the rise of Shorts signaled a sort of death for nuance and depth. “We spend a day on a Short,” he said. “We call each other up in the morning. We have a conversation. We edit together. We add some animation for three hours and then we publish it the next day. Meanwhile, we spend five weeks making these detailed deep dives, and both of us are reading like hundreds of papers for each of these videos.” He keeps asking himself the same question over and over: “Are we working hard on something that no one wants, or are we working hard on something that just needs to find its audience slowly and healthily?”

I sort of understood why they were worried. I never got into TikTok or YouTube Shorts, and I only consume Instagram Reels because the platform basically forces them into my main feed. Sometimes I’m scrolling through them and can feel myself starting to bristle at the lack of agency in my own content choices. There’s just something so thirsty in every viral shortform video, mostly because the best practitioners of the medium know they have mere seconds to capture your attention. I go from enjoying the first few videos to growing increasingly paranoid that I’m sending the wrong signals to the algorithm by lingering on a particular video for too long. Eventually the pressure gets to be too much and I just close the app.

So yes, I share their fear that shortform video is severing the connection between creators and the users that consume their content, but at the same time, I know Howtown’s success on Shorts is correlating to higher interest in their longform content. I calculated the average viewership for their first seven longform videos, and it came to about 311,000 views.

The average viewership for their most recent seven? 778,000.

Nuance and depth aren’t dead yet.

Vox’s squandered opportunity

Whenever I interviewed sources for this piece, I always started with the same question: what was it about Vox as an institution that allowed it to basically invent its own language of visual storytelling? How did its video team become this skunk works incubator for churning out the most successful journalists on YouTube?

Nearly every person I spoke to pointed to the absolutely bizarre and unprecedented decision from higher-ups at the company to basically leave the YouTube team to its own devices. “It was amazing, in retrospect, just how generous they were with our team,” said Fong. “And maybe that reflects the fact that most of the people in charge don't watch video, were not particularly tuned to what was happening on YouTube, and maybe didn’t predict how many eyeballs we would end up getting and how big that would factor into a lot of people's perception of what Vox meant. But they left us alone.”

But it was this same indifference that led to Vox squandering all this homegrown talent, to the point that its biggest stars left to hang up their own shingles. In his interview with Colin & Samir, Johnny Harris was asked why the business he was building with New Press was more resilient to creator turnover than Vox. “How do we create a deal that gets talent to want to stay? It turns out that you pay them for what they are bringing into the company. When I was at Vox doing Borders, mine was the most popular show. I was getting paid a good salary, but Vox was not monetizing that show. It would get 100 million views per season, and they were not monetizing that in any significant way. And there was no talent bonus. So I was not getting paid for that, and there was no plan to say, ‘Johnny or Cleo or whoever is someone who wants to build a sort of brand here, we're going to give you a path to do so.’ They tried, but it was never a priority.” In a separate podcast interview, Cleo Abram had a similar insight. “Right now, most media companies are not very well equipped to be like, okay, you're going to go launch your own channel. We're going to give you a salary or healthcare even. You're going to own your own IP, you're going to make revenue in some revenue share, and you're going to make something that is tonally very different from what we're making. I might have taken that offer, but I wasn't surprised that a media company didn't want to offer that.”

It’s not as if that kind of deal would have been unprecedented for Vox. In recent years, it’s forged a number of partnerships with popular podcasters like Taylor Lorenz and Kara Swisher. As Scott Galloway revealed in a recent New York Times interview, these deals were specifically structured so that the creators could own their IP while Vox helped with the production, marketing, and monetization. “My view was we wanted to be building the career tools for creators like us,” Joe Posner told me in an email. “It bummed me out that it seemed like there was a ceiling, at least on YouTube, for where Vox Media was willing to see that ladder going. I think that is connected to the fact that the way they approached video sales was completely separate from the way they approached podcast sales, which didn't make sense to me at all. If you look at it from a high level, the way the company treats Kara Swisher is in almost direct opposition to how it decided it would work with video creators. Why?” Ideally, Posner’s bosses at Vox would have allowed him to hammer out bespoke deals with the talent he had spent so much time nurturing. “I really wish they had.”

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