Journalism has an audience problem. Get Real News is trying something new.

Founder Heidi Przybyla on how creators and news organizations can work together

By Katie Hawkins-Gaar

September 8, 2026

Heidi Przybyla often gets asked why she’d leave a successful career to take such a big risk.

Przybyla spent decades working as a reporter and correspondent inside some of the country’s biggest news organizations. She covered and broke news about presidential candidates, the White House, and national policy decisions. She was part of a team that won the George Polk Award and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. 

Along the way, she also got an inside look at how legacy media operated — and where it was falling short.

“Throughout my career, I’ve had a front-row seat to some pretty big shifts, like our transition to TV, then digital. And now we’re in a third major shift where there’s a separation from what should be our natural audience as journalists,” she said, in reference to rising rates of news avoidance. “The audience we’re meant to serve.” 

Przybyla said the pace of that change, and the industry’s failure to respond to it, became increasingly frustrating. 

“I reached a point where I felt that we were just not innovating, or that we weren’t innovating at the scale that this moment requires,” she said.

Instead of standing by, she approached the problem the way she knew best: like an investigative journalist. In February 2024, Przybyla convened a group of journalists, an artificial intelligence specialist, video experts, and others at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism in Washington, D.C. The group met to explore a big question: What would journalism look like if it were designed to reach people who had stopped consuming it through traditional channels?

“I treated it like a major investigation,” Przybyla said. “Let’s investigate what it would look like if we wanted to build a third way — a new model that meets this moment.”

Tom Glaisyer, who is an expert in media transformation and an Executive Advisor at Democracy Fund, was one of those attendees.

“She had the seed of an idea to reconnect audiences with news that brought together skills and practices from beyond journalism,” he said.

At the time, the path forward wasn’t yet clear. But Glaisyer saw a “journalistic entrepreneur” determined to figure out what a new model might look like.

Nine months later, in November 2024, Przybyla left her role as national investigative correspondent at POLITICO. In a LinkedIn post announcing her departure, she reflected on a quarter-century covering Washington and the country’s biggest stories and posed a question: How could journalism find new ways to reach the people it was meant to serve?

“I have an idea,” she wrote. “And soon I’ll tell you more about it.”

A bridge between journalists and creators

That idea became Get Real News: an organization building infrastructure to reach audiences who have tuned out traditional news. 

Its model pairs journalists with local creators who already have relationships with the communities that news organizations are struggling to reach. Together, they produce credible, accurate, timely information for the social platforms where those audiences already spend their time.

Przybyla describes Get Real as a bridge between two worlds that have traditionally operated separately. 

“On one side there’s journalists reporting the facts,” she explained. “And on the other, there are creators who already have the trust and attention of their audiences.”

The need for that bridge is rooted in an uncomfortable truth: The quality of news doesn’t matter if people don’t see it.

“In the past, news outlets relied on delivering hard copies or boxes on the street corner where you could buy a newspaper,” Glaisyer said. “More recently, digital outlets have relied on SEO. Now, in an age of AI, it is getting more difficult to reach audiences. 

“Get Real News is one solution to that,” he continued, noting that today’s challenges around audiences require a multifaceted approach. “It’s engaging with local voices in a journalistically authentic way to leverage the algorithms.

“It won’t be the only solution to audience generation,” Glaisyer said, noting that though the approach wasn’t a fit with Democracy Fund’s funding focus at the moment, “it seems like a really promising path.”

At the center of Get Real’s model is the Creator Desk, which Przybyla describes as a “nerve center” connecting journalists and creators. It functions as a modern version of a newsroom assignment desk, bringing the two groups into the same workflow and helping creators translate verified reporting and story ideas into short-form vertical video tailored to their communities. 

Get Real also builds state-focused social channels around local information and culture, then works with newsrooms and other partners on sustained news campaigns around issues that matter to those communities.

Putting the model to work

Pennsylvania is the first state where Get Real has deployed those three pieces together: the Creator Desk, a statewide social channel, and news campaigns. Through Pennsylvania Reals, Get Real works with local creators to produce short-form videos about everything from local history and culture to current events.

“What we do is match creators with the things they’re interested in and we give them the facts,” Przybyla explained.

One of those creators is Ellen Kotzin, whose Instagram account, @pittsburghhills, has more than 100,000 followers. When Przybyla asked Kotzin what issues she cared about, she pointed to data centers.

Kotzin, a comedian and improviser, thought people didn’t understand what a data center was. So she made a video explaining just that — while dressed as one.

@pennsylvaniareals

PA is becoming a hub for data centers. More than 50 have been proposed in the state, according to Track Data Centers. Residents have expressed concerns about the noise, emissions, and the rising cost of electricity bills while developers say it’s an economic boon that brings jobs and economic livelihood. Comedian correspondent Ellen gets to the bottom of it by talking directly with a data center. • Find out what’s planned in your area: https://trackdatacenters.com 📰 Other Sources: Inside Climate News, Track Data Centers #DataCenter #AI #Pennsylvania #PittsburghLife #PennsylvaniaLife  

♬ original sound – Pennsylvania Reals

The video received 751 likes and 79 reposts on Instagram and more than 1,300 views on TikTok, more than the typical Pennsylvania Reals content so far. While Get Real doesn’t yet have a way to measure whether its audience is more news-avoidant, it does know that 79% of its Instagram audience is between 18 and 55. Reaching people who get information from creators is central to the model — particularly younger audiences, nearly 40% of whom get their news primarily from social media creators, according to research cited by Get Real.

“It wound up performing really well,” Przybyla said. “People loved it and it got across the main information that you would get in a news article about what is a data center and why are people upset about them.”

The creative approach was Kotzin’s, while the journalistic responsibility — making sure the finished video was accurate and balanced — remained with Get Real. 

That balance is central to the model. Get Real doesn’t typically hand creators finished scripts to perform, nor does it hand over a topic and walk away. The organization starts by asking creators what they care about and where they have expertise or interest. It then matches those interests with relevant news.

That approach emerged through roughly 18 months of experimentation. One of Get Real’s biggest discoveries, Przybyla said, was that many creators who had built audiences around lifestyle content were interested in becoming trusted messengers about more consequential issues. 

“They want to also be trusted messengers in their community for important information,” she said.

Get Real now works with creators across Pennsylvania, vetting potential partners and evaluating their existing social media presence before bringing them into the network. It treats those creators as paid collaborators, using model contracts based in part on guidance and best practices from the American Press Institute’s influencer-collaboration work and with input from its law firm to ensure creators are treated fairly and protected.

Early numbers suggest audiences are responding.

Get Real says that Pennsylvania Reals has produced nearly 200 short-form videos with 21 creators since launching in November 2025 and is growing its audience by an average of about 1,600 Pennsylvanians a month. Its Instagram audience, nearly all Pennsylvania-based, has grown by 340% since launch, with 1.9 million impressions to date. The organization reports a 5.75% engagement rate, compared with a 0.99% industry average cited by Hootsuite. 

The organization is also testing whether traditional news organizations will participate. Its proof-of-concept work includes partnerships with TribLIVE and LancasterOnline, while its creator network includes people like Kotzin and Cat Janisko, also known as @pennsylvaniajunkie, both prominent lifestyle voices in the state.

For Przybyla, those partnerships and audience numbers are evidence that the model is moving beyond an idea.

“We’ve proven that legacy media wants this and will collaborate,” she said. “We’re also proving that creators with non-political audiences are willing to carry journalism to their audiences who might not otherwise have sought it out.”

Building the business behind the idea

The experiment is also teaching Przybyla something less measurable: Building a new model for news is a much different job than reporting it.

“I wasn’t prepared for how much of me needs to go to simply the administrative side, the recruiting side, the vetting side, and the fundraising side versus the actual creation of the product,” she said.

That shift has required Przybyla to spend much of her time creating processes and infrastructure — while also figuring out how Get Real can eventually sustain itself.

For now, the organization is fiscally sponsored and relies heavily on philanthropic support, along with consulting revenue. Przybyla says the long-term goal is to build diversified revenue around the audiences and relationships Get Real is creating on social platforms, potentially including sponsored content, brand partnerships, and newsletters.

Get Real has not yet generated revenue from those products, and Przybyla is careful not to present the strategy as a solved problem.

“I don’t think I should talk too much about the specific how we’re going to do it because we haven’t tried it yet,” she said. 

But Przybyla is optimistic about the path ahead. In a follow-up email, she pointed to the value of combining Get Real’s regional audiences with the audiences of its creators. “Individual creators can make thousands of dollars per video from brands and local businesses,” she wrote. “When we combine our audience with that of our creators, the value proposition is exponential.” 

Her team is now developing its first offerings for advertisers, including tiered sponsorship packages built around series such as its Pittsburgh History content. Get Real will manage advertiser and sponsor relationships, keeping that responsibility separate from the creators producing content.

“This collaborative model provides advertisers with access to a high-value regional audience, while ensuring our creator partners receive an equitable cut of the revenue under agreements that protect our editorial independence,” she wrote.

Get Real is continuing to test the model in Pennsylvania while exploring how it might be adapted in other communities. That includes a Heinz Foundation-supported project in Greene County focused on understanding residents’ information needs and developing new infrastructure for a community with limited local news. 

The broader question is whether a model built around creators, journalism, and local news needs can be replicated beyond Pennsylvania.

Get Real represents the kind of innovation Przybyla wanted to see in the newsrooms where she worked: not simply adapting journalism to each new technological shift, but rethinking how news reaches people in the first place.

“We just need a framework for doing that,” she said. “What we’ve proved is that they want to do it. I know we want to do it. Let’s not be afraid. Let’s just do it.”