The same week Paramount Skydance received its takeover of Warner Bros. 111 billion Discovery, journalists, podcasters and media executives gathered in Brooklyn for On Air Fest, an annual conference focused on podcasting, the creative economy and the future of broadcasting. During two days of panel discussions on the rapidly evolving media landscape, one of the sharpest discussions was a live taping of “The Don Lemon Show” about building a media business outside of the legacy system. Lemon, who left CNN in 2023 after 17 years, was joined by ESPN’s Pablo Torre and comedians Gianmarco Soresi and Jay Jurden. They’ve been outspoken about their support for independent media, their push for authenticity and transparency, and the paradox at the heart of it all: Creators have never had more freedom, or more structural vulnerability.
The panel’s most provocative argument was that observational journalism has evolved beyond being just the editorial preferences of online media. Today, it is a very reliable business model. Torre argued that the media’s insistence on omniscience has become a liability. “The media is caught up in being ‘the voice of God’ as if we are neutral judges, contrary to what people hear, that maybe we shouldn’t trust what is handed down to us from above,” he said.
Another, he said, is transparency: State your point of view, make sure you have your facts down, and let the audience evaluate accordingly. “Independent media relies on the ability to report from a perspective,” Torre said. “If you express your opinion, and you’re upfront about it, and you’re assertive in your reporting, at least, the audience gets something like an honest reflection of how you, as this flawed sack of meat, exist in this open political space, how you think and how you feel.”
Building a personal brand, post-CNN
Lemon, who now hosts his own podcast on audio platforms and YouTube, has planned his journey around these principles. “I was disappointed when we had to dress people who denied the election and denied the rebellion,” he told an audience member who asked when he was saddened by corporate issues. His editorial philosophy is straight to the point: “Don’t give false equality, and don’t give false information. It’s very simple.” He described broadcasting live on the streets of New York the next morning with nothing but a selfie stick and an iPhone, a production that would have required a satellite truck and at least eight network staff.
Lemon now handles planning, sales, and legal herself, from sourcing content at 3 a.m. to business calls to preparing her 5 p.m. show. “This is a lot of work, but I love it because it’s mine,” she said. He drew several thousand viewers for his State of the Union show on what he called “my little private station.”
He may own all the upside, but he also owns all the overhead. That responsibility extends to the independent media. Legacy media, for all its faults, once provided a “separation between the quality of work and the economic stimulus,” Torre said. Good journalism can be a loss leader within a big business. When that erodes, you “inevitably trade off” with work, he added.
Independent creators who left the networks are now dependent on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, TikTok and other platforms with variable goals and fuzzy algorithms. Torre agreed to the deal: He traded one manager for another.
However, the challenge of building credibility with the audience remains. To that end, the panelists agreed that journalism works best when embedded in content people are already consuming—something Torre and Soresi, like many late-night hosts, already do. Torre, whose ESPN report covers sports, culture, and politics, calls sports “the one last farm,” one of the few platforms where people across the political spectrum share live experiences. The strategy, he suggested, is the Trojan horse: Present it as a sports story, deliver something serious. “It is discussed, reported, and shows people that in this sports story, there is something else that cannot be denied, because the journalist made it so,” he explained.
Lemon, whose lighthearted banter with Jurden was a far cry from his CNN persona, argued that humor works the same way. “If you soften the sea, people will learn things,” he said.
Now how and where are the stories used
That dynamic audience—meet where they are before going to the heavy lifting—also shapes how political news is consumed. When an audience member floated the idea of getting a “leftist Joe Rogan,” Jurden dismissed the premise, saying Rogan serves less as a mastermind than a mirror to his guests. “Joe Rogan on the left is Joe Rogan when he’s talking to someone on the left,” Jurden said. Torre reminded the audience that when he launched, Rogan’s show focused on political topics like mixed martial arts and Bigfoot. “He brought together a union of boys who did not come there for politics and then stayed when he entered politics.”
Other panels at On Air Fest reinforced these themes. “Public is turning into television. But guess what—television is turning into radio,” Audie Cornish, former host of NPR’s “All Things Considered” and current host of CNN’s “The Assignment” podcast, told the Observer during a Q&A session. “Nobody knows. And that’s a great place to be.”
On the corporate overlord front, Ari Shapiro, Cornish’s former host of “All Things Considered”, offered a promising forecast for his former employer, NPR, which lost government funding last year. “This could be a difficult year or two [for NPR],” Shapiro told the Observer, but “the truth is that it is run by journalists, not businessmen, not billionaires, not companies with other interests. On the other side of that rough patch, I believe NPR’s future is really bright. “
No matter how you look at it, most of that future will probably live on YouTube, where more than 15 billion hours of news content consumed in the first six months of 2025, according to statistics the video stream announced at its Independent Media conference last week. (YouTube’s internal polling also suggested that nearly half of all voters now rely on its platform more than mainstream television for news and political analysis.)
Lemon noted that legacy media is already taking cues, with on-air talent adopting a strong personal style, coined by independent creators. He took it as a compliment, while Torre took it as a warning sign. “Incentive agencies are very clear on how to at least do authentication,” he said. “That, to me, is always the troubling truth of the media–you do what honesty says.”
