The rise of the news creator

Fresh from the first day of the Asian Leaders Summit 2025 by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) in Singapore, one topic stood out: the rise of the news creator.

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For millions of young people, news today is as likely to come from a social media creator as from a traditional newsroom. Creators thrive on agility, authenticity, and the strength of devoted communities. Legacy media, meanwhile, are built on depth, trust, and reach. Both are essential forces in today's information landscape and yet they seldom collaborate.

In the past decade, we've witnessed how Filipinos consume news shifting dramatically toward social media. The rise of news creators has become an inseparable part of that transformation.

But what exactly are news creators?

A Reuters Institute report, "Mapping news creators and influencers in social media and video networks," published on Oct. 28, 2025, defines news creators as "individuals (or sometimes small groups of individuals) who create and distribute content primarily through social and video networks and have some impact on public debates around news and current affairs. News creators are independent from wider news institutions for at least some of their news output. As such, they overlap with what are sometimes referred to as 'newsfluencers' (Hurcombe 2024) or 'peripheral actors' in the academic literature (Hanusch and Löhmann 2022)."