on attribution.
David Meyer, managing editor of Streetsblog, said on Twitter Monday that a popular content creator used his outlet’s photos and quotes without attribution. The original reporting, he noted, took more than a year and thousands of dollars. He identified the creator as Nile Berry, or @urbanexplained, who has made a name for himself in the urbanism space. Berry's success is real, and it doesn't come from repackaging other people's work alone. He built a following and deep engagement as an independent creator and has leveraged it to also break into traditional media spaces.
Meyer objects to the missing credit. He was quote-tweeting The New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka, who had posted about how short-form video, YouTube and podcast studios lean on newsroom labor. Meyer’s own thread noted how introducing his team’s reporting to more people was a net positive, but that uncredited use undermines efforts to grow one’s own audience.
Attribution has been a growth industry in New York media lately. In this more niche conversation, however, most arguments about journalists and creators are centered on the people creating the content. The more useful question is about the person watching.
A viewer builds a relationship with a voice and comes to trust it. Chayka noted in his thread that such creators have "parasocial trust that's not particularly earned" in terms of journalistic legitimacy. Either way, the viewer usually can't see what the voice is standing on: original reporting, someone else's reporting, a press release or a paid partnership. Attribution is how they find out. Without it, viewers have fewer ways to know. Gallup found last year that 28% of Americans trust the news media, a record low. The International AI Safety Report says people who chatted with GPT-4o for five minutes mistook its text for human writing 77% of the time. When you can't tell legitimacy at a glance, a named source is about all a viewer has left.
The gap isn't only about newsrooms. New York media was in a tizzy recently about how New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's office has worked with more than 1,200 creators, with critics questioning whether viewers can tell when a creator is informing them or amplifying City Hall.
As a former (some might say failed) local reporter, I think some of the criticism around creators is overblown and speculative. There’s nothing particularly groundbreaking about people outside newsmaking monetizing content derived from professional journalism. Rush Limbaugh wasn’t exactly a journalist, even if his entire platform relied heavily on newsroom reporting.
So maybe creators aren’t actually the problem. Maybe they are part of the solution. Pew found that 65% of people who get news from influencers say it helps them understand current events. As Julia Angwin of Proof News noted at a March 2026 Columbia panel that opened the Saving Journalism conference, audiences have "voted with their feet" as to where they go for news.
Three other objections deserve an answer. First, some will say facts can't be owned. Local TV and radio have read the morning paper on air for decades. True, and any NY1 "In the Papers" devotee knows the norm is to name the paper.
Second, some may also argue that paywalling information is the ultimate but necessary solution to ensure newsroom content can at least be paid for via subscriber models. But paywalls won’t work either, COVID-conscious lesbian bar notwithstanding. Like famed chaos theoretician Ian Malcolm said, life finds a way, and information does too. Nothing stops cribbing, so the goal is to make attribution more frictionless.
Finally, some will say credit doesn't pay a reporter. That's true, and Chayka's labor point stands. But credit is how a viewer finds the newsroom, and finding it comes before subscribing or donating. Without attribution, there's nothing to convert.
Everyone in this chain has a part to play. I don't have all the answers, but here's where we could try to start:
Audiences. As a consumer of the information, either literally or rhetorically ask where a claim or a report came from.
Creators. Say the outlet's name out loud and show it on screen with the claim. Link it in the caption or whatever “link-in-bio" tool you prefer.
Newsrooms. Consider creating and sharing a short "how to credit us" policy. Since creators are being asked to disclose who's behind their posts, newsrooms could look inward too. Most notable nonprofit newsrooms already disclose donors for certain stories, and for-profit publications could disclose major advertisers, at least when a story is about one.
Platforms. They have little reason to problem-solve here and have shown a pattern of downranking links to journalism, even though journalists keep certain websites relevant. But platforms could add a field on upload pages for users to ID sources.
Press offices and PR firms. People like me decide who gets access to certain opportunities. We can encourage creators to cite the reporting they use, and link it in captions or the “link-in-bio" tool.
When I'm lurking on TikTok, I usually can't tell which parts of an explainer came from a reporter who spent a year on it and which came from an afternoon of research. Most viewers can't either. A few words in the caption would tell them, and the creator loses nothing. The creator has their take, the newsroom gets the credit, and the audience is better informed about what they're watching before they doomscroll to the next video.
