New From Pop Culture Collaborative: How to Partner With Creators

I am still thinking about Hank Green’s keynote at last month’s Media Impact Forum. He made the case that “authenticity is cheap, but credibility is expensive,” and then offered a useful reframing grantmakers grappling with funding creators and creator infrastructure. It’s not solely about how fund creators, Hank said, but about how to build an ecosystem that includes them.

Pop Culture Collaborative’s recent Digital Waves series on digital creators, offers a great starting place for funding that new ecosystem. Written in partnership with Dot Connector, the four-part series is aptly titled “Imagine the Pluralist Narrative Power We Will Build: A Primer for Investing in Digital Creator Infrastructure”:

• Part 1 makes the case for why funders need to rethink creator partnerships (digital creators now shape how tens of millions of people get and make sense of the news)
• Part 2 names 10 structural barriers driving creator burnout, from one-person-agency overload to competition from AI-generated content
• Part 3 lays out partnership models, mapped to what funders want (narrative reach) and what creators need (sustainability)
• Part 4 turns to infrastructure and names models such as creator incubators, fellowships, peer networks, etc., with three filters for assessing which ones are worth supporting

The series pairs well with an existing resource: the Lenfest Institute’s Creator Journalism Trust and Credibility Toolkit, built with Knight Communities Network, Project C and Trusting News. Written for funders focused on local journalism, the toolkit features a green/yellow/red trust framework, guidance for finding creators in your region, outreach templates, an ethics checklist, and guidance on partnership agreements.

These two documents give funders concrete starting points to start engaging creators. But it’s still worth naming what’s still missing. In its toolkit, Lenfest acknowledges the field still doesn’t have solid research on what signals actually build trust between creators and audiences, what support creators need to thrive, or how platform algorithms help or hurt credible information. And the Pop Culture Collaborative says that none of the infrastructure models fully solve the burnout problems they identify.

If you’d like to talk about your creator funding strategy or have a resource to add to the mix, please reach out! We’d love to hear what you’re seeing and add it to MIF’s Resource Library.