Your niche is your survival

If there’s one piece of advice that emerged most often from all the journalists-gone-solo that I spoke with, it’s the importance of having a tightly defined focus and a specific audience in mind.

"You have to have a niche," Cillizza told me. "Have a specific angle, and then make that angle absolutely indispensable for people who care about this stuff. Because, ultimately, you need to convince them why they have to pay you for what you do." For him, that lane is political analysis with a conversational, accessible voice.

For Remillard, her lane is federal government explainers — topics like Congress, the Supreme Court, and the White House — delivered in a format that legacy media decided was too boring to bother with. "People, viewers, desperately want to understand what's going on,” she told me.

Griff saw a specific gap in travel journalism — specifically, the space between a credentialed reporter and travel-focused influencer — and decided to build his post-Points Guy identity around owning it. Mak covers one war, in one city, through one specific lens — the human-focused side of the story.

“Mainstream outlets do a great job of answering the what, when, where questions about the news, but do a very superficial survey of the 'who,’” Mak told me. It's a formula that’s built Mak’s The Counteroffensive into one of Substack's most-read international newsletters, filled with stories about everything from the stress mothers face caring for newborns without electricity to how Ukrainian seniors are using TikTok to cope with war-induced stress.

And then there’s Ramos, who has perhaps the most clearly defined niche of all the journalists I spoke with — a pro-immigrant, pro-democracy point of view. "I've moved to a new space, with a lot of freedom and a lot of uncertainty," Jorge told me. “I’m going where the audience is.”

He added: "I believe that journalists never retire. And I still have a battle to fight."

More freedom, higher stakes

Perhaps the most unsurprising thread linking all the journalists I spoke with is that nearly all of them described working longer and harder than they did inside the institutions they left behind.

Mak told me he chose to go independent to report the story no mainstream outlet was telling the way he wanted to tell it. From inside a war zone, in the first person, sometimes hiding in places like a bathtub when the enemy drones come too close.

Remillard was candid about her own trade-off. "I have my own schedule and can do this whenever I want," she told me. "But the downside is I'm doing this for longer every single day of the week. And on top of that, I don't get a guaranteed paycheck every two weeks."

Jorgenson, who left The Washington Post with two colleagues to launch Local News International, hit the ground running. His company is reportedly profitable already, with a revenue mix that includes advertising and grants — not to mention hundreds of thousands of subscribers already on YouTube and TikTok.

"I'm often reminded, from user comments, that I'm their first source to any given news story," Jorgenson told me. "For that reason, I take my news format of being silly but informative very seriously."

No two journeys look alike

The quiet secret of going independent, it turns out, is that nobody really knows what they’re doing when they start."

Segall told me she launched Mostly Human, a creator-led media network, without a clear template for what a creator-led AI media company was supposed to look like. Ramos, one of the most recognizable journalists in the Spanish-speaking world, told me he’s still working out how to monetize his digital operation.

“I knew that after television, I needed to reinvent myself,” he said. “I see the numbers — millions of people viewing what I’m doing online — and the immediate communication I have with the audience that I didn’t have before.”

All the journalists I spoke with represent seven different beats, and seven very different definitions of what going independent actually means. What none of them had, when they made the leap, was a fully-formed plan for what came next.

“I often think about my grandfather who still practices medicine at age 88,” Griff said. “He’s a pathologist who tells me all the time that work is a pleasure to him, and that’s exactly how I feel about travel journalism, creating, and reporting.”

Remillard calls her two years without income simply the cost of doing business. Mak told me that living and reporting from a war zone has proven to be the most meaningful work of his life.

All of them are still writing their blueprints as they go.