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One year ago, Fernando Hurtado left NBC to launch In The Hyphen — a YouTube channel that showcases deeply researched, long-form stories about Latino Americans in English.
When I asked how he describes what he does, he said something I can't stop thinking about: "I want you to know this is farm-to-table content. I'm writing, I'm shooting, I'm editing it, I'm a person."
He wants people to know he's personally responsible for the content he creates.
Farm-to-table.
You know exactly who made it. You know how it was made. You know where it came from. No institutional middlemen. No anonymous bylines. No faceless brand. Just a journalist, a camera, and direct accountability to his audience.
Here's what kills me:
Local journalists were once farm-to-table.
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As Fernando told me, "Local TV news stations and journalists are the original influencers, if you think about it." They had deep community relationships. People recognized them at the grocery store. Viewers trusted them to explain what mattered.
But then we hid them behind logos and call letters. We made journalists interchangeable parts of an institutional machine. We stripped away the very thing that made them trusted: their humanity.
And in many markets, we stripped away their ability to build those connections in the first place. After a day of non-stop work feeding multiple newscasts and platforms with fewer people, there's no time left to do the work that actually builds trust: attending community events, meeting sources for coffee, and understanding what issues matter to your audience.
These deep connections are what Fernando is rebuilding every day with In The Hyphen.
One of his most powerful tools? The comments section.
Fernando told me his comments read like a college discussion forum. People show up with research. Links. Corrections. "Sometimes they call me out," he said. "And sometimes they're right."
He reads every single comment and makes an effort to respond thoughtfully. Even when he disagrees with a viewer, responding "humanizes the person" and makes the audience less likely to engage in "keyboard warrior" behavior.
This isn't a lack of editorial oversight. It's crowd-sourced accountability in real time.
Legacy newsrooms hide corrections in a box nobody reads. Creator-journalists get corrected live, in front of everyone — and have to respond or lose trust.
Fernando views this ongoing interaction as "compound interest" for trust. The more a journalist listens and responds, the more that trust builds over time.
He suggests journalists should build "meaningful communities" around specific niches. Imagine a local reporter who covers parenting in Kansas City — hosting coffee meetups, running a specialized newsletter, creating a space where parents share what's actually affecting their families. That's not just audience building. That's a story pipeline built on real relationships.
What Fernando's doing isn't new. It's what journalism was supposed to be before we industrialized it.
Farm-to-table isn't a trend. It's a return to first principles.
The question isn't whether journalists can build trust this way.
It's whether legacy newsrooms will let them.