Johnny Harris’ Ex-Producer Explains How Journalism is Completely Different Now

people will watch a 50-minute video if you've earned that 50 minutes how long for a standard video would it be from start to finish i think people are very surprised to hear this johnny's videos shoot in like taryn thank you so much for joining the show i'm really interested in learning about your time working with johnny harris and also new press which is still kind of a relatively new endeavor johnny harris and his wife is launched this collective of media organizations and the first one was search party which is hosted by this guy sam ellis why did new press need to exist people are more and more interested i think in hearing a specific perspective and they are not dictating the editorial of their individual creators content channels i'm curious like how the idea of new press turned into something like yeah okay we should make this and then what does it actually take to get that first channel that's not hosted by johnny live with new press as we started to build out what that looked like as a collective rather than just johnny's channel a huge part of that is how you actually take something that works for one creator and turn it into a larger system that can then be adapted applied for future creators at scale to sort of jump start that process so that everyone's not sort of starting from zero as it were johnny was very allergic to the idea of process to begin with and i think that's because so many creators their only experience with somebody coming in and trying to operationalize something or provide structure is to restrict them historically in legacy media it's a huge part of the reason why they decided to be independent creators in the first place is to have so much more of their own ability to determine how they're working a system should enable more creation rather than restrict it once we sort of unlocked that formula it became really clear sort of the the goldmine of that and how we can use that to help other creators launch their channels and you know that's what i'm now doing with the school for moral ambition and with rutger bregman so it's like very exciting to see that this works not just for new press but for other it works you know for creators across the board you built out these operations for the johnny harris team making sure that everything was good that you know people were able to create content effectively at high quality without burning out then sam becomes part of the conversation did sam approach johnny did johnny know sam like how did those early conversations about maybe doing a second channel begin johnny and sam did know each other already from their overlap in the vox days so i think that's a really good point and i think that's a really good point and i think that's a i think it was just something that came about quite naturally in the course of their regular conversation and correspondence you know johnny was building his channel very quickly and people were noticing and a lot of people thought hey that looks great and a lot of creators want to focus on you know the bits that they love in order to to do that what new press is offering to those creators is the production and operational structure and i think that's a really good point to allow them to focus on just that to focus on their journalism to focus on their craft and each of the creators within new press has like a specific subset of the process that they enjoy most and so designing the process to fit for that so for sam it's animation and for christoph it's edit and allowing them both time within the process to do that alongside the editors and animators that we have on the projects is really important so i think that the conversation between sam and johnny is really important and i think that's a really good point and i think that's a and is was mostly around the system the structure the talent to help support you because by that point we had already built out quite a robust team around johnny's channel alone there was a point at which we were producing like 36 videos a year exceptionally high quality the output from your team has been incredible johnny and is have both talked about this publicly but we built out the bible which contains masses and masses of references examples explanations of the terms that we use because new press has a very specific kind of language that is outside of maybe traditional production speak so it makes a lot of sense for people like sam or the second channel which is run by christoph you know the value prop for them joining new press is obvious you get these incredible systems that have been rigorously tested for years on end many made by you from what it sounds like the team crosses over and cross pollinates as well yeah so it's gone through a lot of variations i always said when we were building out systems and processes that this is the v1 and my hope is that there's a v20 and 30 and 40 like we're constantly adjusting and adapting this so that it evolves with our needs as well as the content type that we're making has shifted over time originally we had a fairly dedicated team per creator per show and we had a fairly dedicated team per creator per show and we had a fairly dedicated team per show um when it came to post-production so in terms of an editor and animator it was also our composer tom fox being able to come through and give music for each channel but primarily it was coming from the production management systems those templates creating timelines kind of hand-holding those deliveries between everyone and then of course the actual like management of the release of the channel so the marketing the thumbnails the uploads the prep so really what they were able to hone in and focus on is like what stories am i working on writing those stories to the best of their you know ability because they were able to focus in on that filming it and then sort of creatively overseeing the post-production but not necessarily having to manage the post-production if that makes sense and then when the video comes to our pub cut our final cut they kind of step away and it gets handed off and it releases into the world on its own from from their perspective as it were now that has changed the the sort of buckets of team being shared versus being specifically assigned right now johnny's changing what he's doing in terms of his content he's working on a new show that is being released this year and he's kind of honing in on a specific style and format that he's going to do repeatedly with the human element because of that the team that they're using has changed and they're being utilized differently they're being resourced across to other creators and other channels which is exciting because it allows them to experiment with some other things as well and yeah i mean i stepped out from new press now at the end of may so anything that's happened since i'm not so sure um is this all happening like in person in some like in-person headquarters or is everything happening remote so it's crazy um when it started it was johnny and his living in their parents basement that had been turned into a recording studio and so the majority of the team was not working in a headquarters um the majority of the team was spread out all over the place and then as the team started to grow more and more we started to identify more and more dc-based team members who are working in person but pretty soon that one-bedroom studio apartment slash office space was going to be a recording studio became full to the brim and as we expanded as we brought on sam and christoph who are based in new york we then had team split there a lot of people who have their fingerprints all over new press who are based in europe and the uk i'm in london there's someone in bristol there is a group of team members in copenhagen there's someone in spain like now new press is in a very different place than it was and they are formalizing that a little bit more so they have quite a large dc studio space and office now that is sort of their headquarters in dc could you please walk me through what a video looks like for johnny's team from ideation to publishing each phase has been owned by a different sort of member of the team or a different department as it were being shepherded start to finish by when i was there myself as well as is and johnny and over time moved johnny more and more out of post-production so that he could focus in on the pre-production and concentrate his time there there was an idea of a story there was a topic something really really high level i'm talking like a sentence or two or sometimes it was johnny just saying i really want to go to bhutan can we figure out something there and other times it was based around a visual johnny found a really cool map and he wanted to expand upon that so there's there's these ideas that are kind of floating out in the ether that might come from johnny that might come from is and it might come from one of the story producers who can sort of pitch then they would kind of deliver that pitch including johnny if he was the one coming up with this idea he'd kind of deliver a pitch on it and he'd stress test that with is we would assign one of the story producers or a research producer to kind of do a little initial digging and see if the story had legs outline what that area might be if we were to move forward with the video kind of key characters things like that at that point it would move from a pitch if it was greenlit into an infodoc phase. Now, the greenlight phase would come from Johnny and Iz, and that would be delivered to me. And that would be sort of my greenlight to kind of kick everything off and start the machine moving. So that would come to me. It would have kind of the top line brief of what this story was. It would have an estimate of sort of how long we thought that story would be. It would be outlining what style of video it is, because over the years, Johnny developed sort of certain buckets. It might be a VO map splainer. And then it would also outline sort of an animation style or needs based on Johnny's idea. If we knew at that stage, sometimes we didn't. And then any stipulations around like this is being made for the election. So, needs to come out before the election, you know, that type of thing. So then they'd start research and infodoc, which is sort of our researcher reporting memo, our version of that. And then it would go through a few rounds of deliveries to Johnny to review, to give notes, to ask further questions, to say, this is what interests me. Go dig more on that. And then he'd come to his scripting phase. And during the scripting phase, he'd be writing alongside that story producer, a research producer. He would be taking interviews with experts. Doing outreach. He might be filming some of that process, depending on the video style, if he was taking you along the journey of the kind of reporting. And then we would move into kind of our latter half of the pre-production phase. Once a script was locked in terms of our spoken words, we would then move into a phase where our visual producers, our senior video producers, our composer would come in, throwing in examples of what they were doing. And then a specific archive, making a shot list, making a B-roll shot list, coming up with, hey, I think this would be really great if we actually made a game board or something like that. So that process would then go into sort of that phase where it began to be shaped for production. And then we'd move into production and we would shoot. And for the large majority of the time that I was there, shoots were, I think people are very surprised to hear this. Everyone's been shocked whenever I've said it before. Johnny's videos shoot in like three or four hours maximum. And we might have multiple setups. So then we'll do like two hours one morning and two hours another afternoon and things like that. But for quite a while there, especially when we were in that 36 videos a year phase, you had three or four hours to film that video and it better be filmed by the time it's done. We then move into sort of our production kickoff phase. So the entire team, would get together at that point. Anyone who touched on that specific project would all come together. They'd get the top line vision for the story, any notes on like what actually happened on the shoot, anything that fundamentally has changed from the script, et cetera. And then it moves into post-production and we had editing, animating happening simultaneously. And our post-production process goes through, you know, a kind of really robust cut cycle, starting with the shame cut, which is a really robust cut. And then we had the post-production process, which both Johnny and Iz and the current VP of production, John Lawrence have kind of talked about everywhere. So there's plenty more resources out there in terms of how we view a shame cut. I love the title, A Shame Cut. That's so funny. It's great. And I will say like, as a, you know, senior production manager, who's kind of handling all of the baton passes between everyone, I think historically you sort of have to like pry and edit from an editor's hands, you know, like I've never met an editor who's not a perfectionist and- Right. You know, wouldn't gladly take an extra six weeks if you gave it to them, right? And so you sort of have to pry it from them. And so in order to kind of encourage this, I guess, ethos around the work, we named it A Shame Cut to really make it clear to them, like the expectation is that this is something so scrappy. It is something you might feel ashamed to hand over, but you shouldn't because it's exactly what it needs to be. Absolutely. Because actually seeing it that early is so important to understanding the shape of the story and the beats and the music needs and the animation needs. And you can course correct or give more specific direction much more effectively, I think, early on and then allow people to do it right from the get-go rather than waiting till it's in a more advanced state and then maybe needing to go back and sort of redo work that's already done. So Shame Cut, then we'd go to the rough cut, then we'd go to a fine cut, and then a pub cut. And that's sort of a standard Johnny talking head explainer. There's a totally different version of this process that takes place for field stories. There's a totally different version of this process that takes place for the VO map explainers where it's a fully animated voiceover only. And how long for a standard video would it be from start to finish? That could vary in terms of the pre-production process. There was a period of time which, you know, we discovered in the end is not so sustainable. But when we were in that 36 video year phase and we were kind of seeing what was possible and just pushing the limits, there was a period where essentially start to finish 10 weeks in total, maybe even less sometimes. I think our record was at one point we had 17 videos in production at one time. Oh my goodness. And that's across the channels, to be clear. That's not just Johnny. That's including Sam and Christophe. And you were going to bed on time and like you weren't, you weren't like overdoing it kind of thing? Or was this like a really big push? Okay. I would say no, I was not going to bed on time because I was in London. So I had a very interesting sleep schedule for a while there. But no, I mean, we figured out a way to make that work. And I think that we learned a lot of lessons from it and then refined it based on that. Once our videos started to include more 3D animation, for example, we were like, this is no longer sustainable. We need to adjust it in this way. We need to move more time in the process. At the beginning, there needs to be more space for the 3D animator to start building this before the edit even starts. What is like the team that's required to carry out like 17 videos in parallel? Like how many editors or, you know, various positions do you have for that? At that point in time, the team was a little bit different. But at that point in time, while we were doing that phase, that era, we had roughly, I'm like, let me count. Hold on. We had two senior video producers who worked primarily on Johnny's channel. And those were team members who started off as editors and just were like so deeply entrenched in the new press, like language and style and really understanding what Johnny and Iz were doing. And so we were like, okay, let's do this. Let's do this. Let's do this. Let's do this. They would be supervising more junior editors on others and giving them creative notes to kind of relieve that notes burden, I guess, from Johnny and Iz. And we started to identify like where were the most effective points of the process for Johnny and Iz to step in and give those notes to really shape it. We probably had at that point in time, maybe three or four full-time editors as well as three or four full-time editors. Let's do this. Let's do this. Let's do this. Let's do this. Let's do this. Let's do this. Let's do this. Probably another six to eight freelance editors. And then some of these editors are also animators. So we were working with them in some capacities, just as editors, just as animators. Sometimes they were editing and animating on the same video. It really did like vary quite a bit there. And then we had one music composer. We had Tom Fox holding down the fort across the whole thing, but we also had the benefit of him having created so much music over the years, so we had sort of a large, robust library that we could pull from and editors could go to that and search a certain vibe or a certain, you know, keyword in terms of what they were looking for, like thinky or suspense. I adore Tom Fox's music, by the way. I think he's so cool. There's not a lot of composers in this industry, at least the ones that I like that I know of. And he is top of game. He's so cool. Yeah, I think I think his music and his style like shaped so much of the video taste as well. Yeah, I actually lead a number of editors in the work that I do outside of this podcast. And one of the things that I really try to share with them is get an understanding of the music flow in a Johnny Harris video. Johnny made this video like five or six years ago. It was like how I use music. It's got, I think, a quarter million views, so it's not even viral by his standards. But the way that Johnny thinks about music, alternating between feeling music and thinking music. The way that that's like conveyed through Tom's compositions, that's stuff that I try and like put on my own editors. I'm like, this is what we should work towards. Like, this is what excellence looks like. I mean, it's it's great. I had the great privilege of working with so many people on that team, truly not just very talented people, but awesome people who we were sleeping on night trains in the Arctic Circle on our way to Finland. And we were sleeping in a mangrove forest in the middle of Japan. Like, you have to have good people around you in order to do work like that. I want to zoom out a little bit and give your response to what the creator economy looks like right now and where you think it's headed in the next year two years five years do you have any theories for years we talked about creators being the alternative to the media institutions right i even started this conversation sort of in that place but i do think that that distinction is starting to become obsolete because i do think the most interesting creators are sort of becoming these institutions themselves right as new press shows they've got researchers producers editors animators designers we have a fact checking process they have businesses supporting all of this work so i think that the story isn't necessarily that like creators are replacing traditional media i think that the other huge shift that we're seeing is that youtube's sort of increasingly becoming something that somebody watches beyond just their phone or their computer people are watching it on their tv it is becoming much more premium and i think that we're probably going to see a lot more premium long form creator work not less and i think that that's a really hot take i think that short form is having its its moment right now and i think short form is enormously important for discovery but i have always felt this way i don't feel that like people in general have just like lost the ability to concentrate anymore i think that that's a specific type of um media that people are looking to consume at certain times but i do think people will watch a 50 minute video if you've earned that 50 minutes and i think if you've given them a promise that you've delivered on and if the idea is really valuable and worthwhile and you've also made sure that that idea has been translated in a way that is visually compelling and helps them understand something deeper that's sort of why i have made this leap now from new press to the school for moral ambition with rutger because i started to get more and more interested in these extraordinary researchers or writers or historians including young people who don't yet have a platform but who have these big thoughts and and feel compelled to do something to share them i i felt compelled to use my skills to kind of help elevate that in a bigger way and bring about like a bit more action not just like a lot of people do but i'm really interested in how the infrastructure that i can create around creator production can help other exceptional voices reach you know a larger audience my boss mark manson about a year ago he told me that he sensed the creator economy was doing something called bifurcating i didn't know what that word meant at the time but it basically meant splitting up and he said that he saw this happen in his blogging era and he said that he saw this happen which was like 2010 2012 and he said that blog posts used to be 500 words but then it became either 2000 words or a tweet and he said that attention was being bifurcated so there was a lot of short form interest and a lot of really long form interest but the interest in the middle wasn't there and he predicted that that was going to happen to this and to this industry and you kind of touched on that a little bit where the short form world it's got its own ecosystem and people are okay with that and there's standards of what consumption looks like there it seems like authenticity and and like low production value is kind of winning but on the flip side of it longer videos and not only that but more polished professional documentary style pieces of content are also winning and it sounds like with your career you're really excited about the really polished longer stuff that has some substance to it that hits an audience where it leaves some kind of like really meaningful impression with them i think that that's true i think ultimately you know i am interested in stories that shape an audience that impact people and that have something really i think important to say or is something that builds community or action there's there's so many different like avenues and keywords or whatever i can say here in terms of what i'm interested in but i would actually also offer i i think it's true that it is bifurcating that we've got the um and then we've got the super polished johnny you know 50 minute video that you know has a production value beyond anything on netflix you know they're like there's those two avenues for sure but i actually think we're starting to see this emergence right now of this interest in the mid the mid-length like the eight the eight minute video what can we tell in that form that kind of draws from both or that maybe dives a bit deeper into a specific area of what would be a long-form video talking about an entire topic maybe you kind of go down one of those avenues of rabbit hole and you expand upon it so that someone really understands what that avenue is i do think that this mid-length is starting we saw it at new press we're seeing it with rock verse content there is something in that that i think is really worth experimenting with and i think that's quite funny because that's kind of going back to again this early youtube era you know originally youtube had a four minute video cap then it expanded and it was you know slightly longer and slightly longer and slightly longer but for a huge portion of that early youtube days like it was very popular to have like a four to eight minute video and that was something that really engaged people that really drove community building but also views and sort of engagement and i sort of feel like we're also seeing a sense of that come back around in a way in the way that i feel like we're seeing this drive back toward the individual creator uh voice and i think what's interesting is there's so many organizations like new press like the school for moral ambition has big plans around what they're doing that i can't talk about yet annoyingly um but there's these organizations that are starting to exist to champion you know all of these individual voices but what's important is that we're retaining that individual creator's voice because that's what people want to engage with and relate to and i think that they have an expectation of what they're coming to engage with whereas if you go to the home page of new york times video like you have a really eclectic selection to choose from and that might be overwhelming to somebody who has the entire world at their fingertips already and i think offering somebody a hey this is a rucker bregman video this is a christoph haubertson video and you sort of know what you're going into is something that's um really valuable to an audience i think and it helps build sort of um like long-term loyalty and engagement that segues quite nicely into my last question who is a voice on the internet right now who is doing something excellent that deserves more attention so i'm going to say something that's like kind of interesting because it's not necessarily in video but i think hannah ritchie is really interesting in terms of having serious expertise and important subjects sort of evidence-led optimism and and i like this idea of how or this question maybe of how an authoritative thinker can become like a genuinely native video or media-led voice and so i see someone like hannah ritchie and what she's doing and i go can i make a channel out of that like can i can i because we've started we started to do that at new press like max fisher is not natively you know a filmmaker max is the first one at new press who doesn't have video or animation or filmmaking experience and they're starting to play that experiment there and i'm sort of interested in playing that experiment now out at the school for moral ambition let's find these really serious thinkers these really interesting compelling authoritative voices these experts who have you know the ability to shape thoughts so clearly and say now can we apply that process that system of production to somebody who isn't already coming from that place and i think that that is where i'm most interested in seeing what comes next interesting so hannah is a writer she's not video native correct so maybe maybe she will be with your help maybe i don't know i haven't spoken with her to be clear i just think oh i could turn that into some really interesting animations sure sure sure you know in this field we all know but like visuals do that and i think that's a really interesting thing to do and i think that's a really interesting intellectual work we don't have a shortage of ideas out there it's just translating it and distributing it so i'm excited to kind of find more avenues and test out the formula as it were on on new creators and new thinkers and writers thank you so much for watching or listening to this episode if you're new here please consider subscribing or leaving us a review on the audio platforms it helps us as a very new show if you want to check out another episode just look through our library it's starting to build up we're at like 40 episodes now you and we have a new one coming out every single thursday so thank you for being here and i will see you then