Have you heard of Katie Phang? If you haven’t, you will. She is on a one-woman legal crusade to uncover the secrets of the Epstein files, and she’s making progress where conventional reporters have not. She (like an increasing number of other independent reporters) is also making innovative use of YouTube to promote and fund her efforts.

Read more: Katie Phang, the Epstein files, and YouTube as a rising source of news

Katie Phang has an interesting background. According to Wikipedia, she is the daughter of South Korean immigrants and she earned a law degree in 2000. After law school, she worked for the Florida state attorney’s office but was told to quit when she began providing legal commentary for a local TV station. She joined a private law firm and subsequently began providing legal analysis for Fox News, then for NBC and CNBC. In 2022, she launched The Katie Phang Show on MSNBC and Peacock. It was cancelled in April 2025.

In May 2025, Phang started a YouTube channel covering legal matters in partnership with The Meidas Touch Network, a loose affiliation of progressive podcasters and YouTube legal reporters.

Digging into the Epstein files. After the Epstein Files Transparency Act was passed, many reporters tried to use Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to get the massive redactions removed and to get access to the large volume of files that were not released at all. (The Act requires the release of all the files, and each redaction has to have a written justification.) The Department of Justice found ways to deny those FOIA requests, so Phang decided to try a different tack.

In April 2026, Phang filed a lawsuit against Attorney General Todd Blanche, accusing him of failing to comply with the Epstein Act. She argued that her ability to function as a legal reporter was blocked by Blanche’s failure. Then Phang asked the court to issue an injunction specifically concerning the redactions in a handful of the files where it seemed clear that the redactions were done to protect President Trump and other prominent figures. The judge granted that injunction. The DoJ has failed to comply and, in hearings over the past few weeks, the judge has begun talking about possible contempt of court findings against Blanche. The case seems to rapidly be coming to a head.

Phang has been reporting on this story every day (sometimes more than once a day) on her YouTube channel. Her legal background, her journalistic experience, and her no-nonsense, forthright delivery have made her channel required viewing for anyone interested in the Epstein files. Her updates include aspects of the Epstein case that others have brought to light, as well as the state of her own case. She also provides occasional summaries of other legal news related to the Trump administration. She has accumulated hundreds of thousands of subscribers to her YouTube channel.

Personally, I have found Phang’s YouTube reporting to be the single best and most timely source for Epstein information. Her background, her tenacious, no-holds-barred approach, and her boundless energy set her apart from others reporting on the Epstein files. To see what her work is like, go to YouTube.com and search for “Katie Phang”. Or, go to Phang’s substack (https://katiephang.substack.com/) and sign up for a free subscription (which will get you daily emails with links to her videos).

YouTube news and the YouTube business model. Increasingly, I find myself getting more news from YouTube and Substack, and less from The New York Times and The Washington Post (Jan and I subscribe digitally to both). For the latest on AI, the war in Ukraine, and the economy, I find that certain YouTube channels provide quicker and more comprehensive information than the conventional press does. Of course, there is a tremendous amount of garbage too, which means it takes a lot of thoughtful sorting through YouTube videos to find the gems. And some YouTubers have resorted to AI impersonations of real commentators to gain viewers. It’s a bit of a jungle.

So how does Katie Phang (and others like her) make a living by reporting news on YouTube? Well, subscribers to her Substack are encouraged to sign up for a paid subscription ($8/month). That gets you the ability to comment on her videos and Substack posts, “subscriber-only posts/videos and full archive access”, and “detailed annotations (notes) on the latest legal filings”. If Phang can get to 1,000 paid subscribers (and she may already have that many), that’s a living wage.

She also gets ad revenue in two forms. YouTube pays her 55% of the money YouTube gets from the YouTube ads that interrupt her show several times per video (unless you pay YouTube to suppress them).  And she also finds sponsors of her own, whose ads she reads on the air as part of each video. These ads have featured products such as cosmetics, a Medicare guidance service, and bras.

When people elect to take a paid Substack subscription, Phang gets a cut of that revenue too.

It is clear that a person with the size of audience that Phang has can make a good living. She has about 800,000 subscribers now, and is shooting for 1 million by the end of the year. That makes her channel very attractive to advertisers who think their products will appeal to her audience.

Other YouTube news sources.  Katie Phang is by no means the only YouTube news analyst worth watching. Many readers probably watch Heather Cox Richardson’s wonderful analysis of political news, with frequent doses of historical context, on YouTube. She has become a YouTube star.

If you read the Substack posts of Paul Krugman, you can watch him read the same content on YouTube videos. In fact, many (most?) of his Substack posts are transcripts of YouTube videos.

For details on the Ukraine war, “Professor Gerdes” is a good daily source—though he may provide more information than you really wanted. For a broader overview, look for interviews with Ben Hodges, a retired general who was commander of the US Army presence in Europe. (There are also what appear to be AI-generated fake videos of Hodges, so stay alert.)

El (no last name given) of “House of El” provides good coverage of events in the AI world.

Do you have favorite YouTube news sources? Please mention them in the comments.