Bertrand Marquette

Social media didn't just change the distribution of news — it changed who holds the authority to report it. The newsroom used to be the gatekeeper. Now a creator with a phone and a niche audience can break a story, frame it, and reach more people than a national outlet, without ever calling themselves a journalist. The upside is speed and access: stories surface faster and from places traditional media never reached. The cost is that the algorithm, not the editor, now decides what gets seen. Reach rewards emotion and velocity, not accuracy — so the incentive structure of news has quietly shifted toward whatever travels well, not necessarily what's true. For the creator economy specifically, the line between "creator" and "journalist" is dissolving. Audiences increasingly trust individuals over institutions, which puts real editorial responsibility in the hands of people who never signed up for it. That's the story I find most interesting to cover: not whether social media is good or bad for news, but who's accountable when the audience trusts a face more than a masthead.

For the research and SEO side, I rely on the tools that show me how information actually moves online — Google Search Console and analytics to see what surfaces and why, an SEO suite like Ahrefs or Semrush for keyword and authority data, and Google Trends to catch a topic before it peaks. A lot of my reporting starts as a data anomaly: a search pattern or a traffic spike that signals a story before anyone's written it. For the influence and creator side, I watch the platforms directly — TikTok, Instagram and YouTube native analytics, plus social listening tools to track how a campaign or a creator is actually performing versus how it's being marketed. And for the craft itself, the honest answer: a clean writing setup, a spreadsheet for everything, and AI tools as a research and drafting assistant — never as a replacement for verification. The judgment still has to be human.

Twitter

Honestly, the creators and operators who actually move the industry — the people building real businesses behind the follower counts. I'd rather have one media buyer or a creator running a seven-figure operation reading my work than a million passive followers. If I'm being specific: the platform people. Someone on TikTok's or YouTube's creator-partnerships side following along would tell me I'm covering the things that actually matter to the people shaping the rules.

I came to journalism from the technical side. As an entrepreneur and SEO specialist, I spent years studying how information circulates online — what gets seen, what gets buried, and why. The deeper I went, the more I realized that influencer marketing was reshaping media faster than anyone was explaining it. Most coverage of the creator economy was either hype or PR. I wanted to write the kind of analysis I couldn't find: rigorous, independent, and grounded in how the industry actually works — the platforms, the algorithms, the money. So journalism, for me, wasn't a career change. It was the logical extension of understanding a system well enough to want to explain it clearly to others.