Essay 1.1: How Andrew Callaghan Rebranded Journalism
Success in modern media can be traced to three things: telling good stories, building trust, and branding. For Essay 1.1, we looked at journalist Andrew Callaghan and the rise and fall of 'All Gas No Brakes.'
When Andrew Callghan graduated with a journalism degree in 2019, he decided to hit the road in an RV with his two best friends, to chronicle everything weird and wild about our country.
But it wasn’t his first rodeo. In interviews, the reporter described how his time spent hitchhiking alone as a teenager prepared him for the show he’d become famous for, All Gas No Brakes:
“I would bring a recorder, like a voice memo app. I would hang out at bus stops and hotels and I would talk to people, like, on the edge of society.
Andrew’s channel would go on to rack up millions of views, yet in November 2020, he strangely stopped posting to YouTube. And in March, the truth came out: somehow, he lost the show he had built from the ground up.
Part I: Journalism as Entertainment
With The Daily Show, Jon Stewart popularized something seldom done before: he combined commentary with comedy, toeing the line between journalist and entertainer.
Since then, this model has been tried and tested by plenty of other people, from Stephen Colbert’s The Colbert Report to John Oliver and his deep dives into newsworthy topics on Last Week Tonight.
What’s clear is that this brand of injecting humor into news — a oft-successful combo — is not going anywhere anytime soon. However, for many journalism purists, there’s an inherent problem here, and it’s the concept of objectivity in the pursuit of facts.
Jon Stewart from his 2004 Crossfire appearance.
Whether or not it’s possible to ever be truly objective is a conversation for another day. For this essay, however, I’m going to focus on a fleeting little thing known as trust.
There’s a clip from when Jon Stewart went on political debate show Crossfire only to roast the hosts — including a younger, bow-tie-clad Tucker Carlson — and talk about why this form of media “hurts America.” He said:
“You’re partisan, uh, what do you call it...hacks. You have a responsibility to the public discourse, and you’ve failed miserably.”
If the news anchors weren’t informing Americans, Stewart said, the responsibility fell on comedians like himself, who are really just here to crack jokes and make people laugh. He quipped to the Crossfire hosts:
“You’re on CNN! The show that leads into my show is puppets making prank phone calls!”
Stewart essentially dug the grave for CNN himself, as Crossfire is most famous for getting cancelled shortly after this episode first aired. Over 15 years later, though, his words still ring true. We’re living in a hyper-polarized environment where cable has been replaced by social media as our preferred medium, operating on business models that prey on emotion, attention, and time.
In other words, from a capitalistic standpoint, there’s never been a better time to be a “partisan hack” — looking at you, One America News Network.
This brings me back to the idea of trust. Who do you trust when it comes to how you get your information? Is it rooted in the “professionalism” of the content itself — or rather, the setting in which that content is conveyed?
I was thinking about this a lot in the wake of the protests in Minneapolis in 2020. I consumed a lot of news from different mediums last June, between reading newspapers, listening to podcasts, watching broadcast streams, and yes, scrolling through Twitter.
Andrew Callaghan interviewing people in Minneapolis in the weeks after George Floyd’s murder.
And yet, out of everything I took in, the thing that informed me the most about what was happening on the ground was…on YouTube.
So who was this 23-year-old in the video, fresh out of journalism school, interviewing people as buildings burned down in the background?
Part II: Who Is Andrew Callaghan?
When asked to describe himself in an interview from 2021, Andrew Callaghan had this to say:
“Yeah maybe you could introduce me as Andrew Callaghan, young creative with his finger on the pulse. 3.4 GPA, Multimedia Journalist, Interested in Creating Anthropological Road-Based Study of American Oddity."
A self-described "14-year-old stoner" in high school, Callaghan often found himself surrounded by an eclectic mix of characters in his hometown of Seattle. When he enrolled in a journalism class during his freshman year of high school, his peers were amazed at the eye-opening stories he would present, as he always had a knack for offering a lens into worlds many of us never see up close.
Callaghan’s original zine, dubbed All Gas No Brakes: a hitchhiker's diary
At 19, after his freshman year at Loyola University in New Orleans, Callaghan packed a toothbrush and some clothes and decided to hitchhike across the country. He chronicled his experiences and the people he met on the road with a book called All Gas No Brakes: a hitchhiker's diary.
Pitching the 10,000-word zine to media companies didn't go as well as he might've hoped, but that didn't stop Callaghan from continuing to hone his craft. Along with filming "packages" similar to what's aired on local news, Callaghan quit his job working at a restaurant near campus and launched a channel called Quarter Confessions. The account and its videos would often go viral for its portrayal of the drunk and disorderly on Bourbon Street in New Orleans.
In an interview from 2019, Callaghan talked about how journalism professors taught him to go the "conventional" route, starting at a TV station or local newspaper before working his way up to the New York Times over the course of two decades. He said:
“I felt like with serious straightforward journalistic reporting, there is always this undercurrent of boredom. I like video, I like bare news, I like things that don’t necessarily follow the conventions of journalistic integrity. I like to make my own content, I think it’s more rewarding and I think that people like it more because I don’t follow someone else’s program.”
And while he called formal work covering subjects like prison reform and gentrification "rewarding," he realized how the new form of media he was creating reached more people than the local news. Having learned these lessons — and with a degree in tow — Callaghan once again packed his bags and hit the road, this time with an RV and two of his best friends.
Part III: The Rise of ‘All Gas No Brakes’
Smoking with furries, attending Donald Trump Jr.'s book signing, and interviewing clowns with foot fetishes. This was the natural evolution of Callaghan's original zine, driving around the U.S. and documenting real people and the weirdness running rampant in our country.
From left to right: All Gas No Brakes co-creators Nic Mosher, Andrew Callaghan, and Evan Gilbert-Katz
Among his inspirations, Callaghan references Sacha Baron Cohen's work on The Ali G Show and Daily Show correspondent Wyatt Cenac. When talking with Vice in 2020 about the comedic way in which he edits his videos, Callaghan said, "I think laughs give the brain a green light to absorb information, dark or light."
But he never wanted to create simply meme content. His desire was to provide authentic insight and legitimate reporting into what was happening on the ground. And nowhere was that more prevalent than in Minneapolis, where — in the wake of George Floyd's murder — he interviewed the actual people causing destruction, sometimes even as it happened. He told Vice:
“If you ever see me with no suit on, with a black sweatshirt like this, it means I'm not there to make jokes. It wasn't so much of me being like, 'Oh, let me get political because, you know, I want to get more of a liberal audience.' It was like, 'Media is not covering this. Media is not talking to the people causing destruction in Minneapolis and figuring out why.'”
I first watched All Gas No Brakes in December 2019, yet this was when I truly saw Callaghan's vision — the full potential of this new strain of journalism — realized. This body of work propelled him to new heights, with the channel reaching 1.7M subscribers and tens of thousands of paid supporters on Patreon. He addressed this in the Vice interview:
“I want to be able to make actually comedic shit and then actually do real reporting at the same time. I don't think anyone is, like, going to try to box me in at this point."
Callaghan interviewing three protesters in Portland.
While he would continue to cover the absurdity of rocket launches in Florida and Fourth of July celebrations on the Upper Peninsula, it was his video on the nuances of protests in Portland — protests that many have latched onto for the purpose of biased narrative-making — that showed how he could successfully balance his coverage. In the video, a Black woman at the protests shares a powerful message:
“This is not a joke, and the only reason you think it's a joke is because you're white and you don't have the same fear I have.”
Callaghan then plays footage from an interview with two non-POC individuals at the protest who appear to be naked and under the influence of drugs:
“We only came here to get naked and be sexy and get tear gassed at the orgy. Our objective is...to bring all of us together, black lives, Indian, South American."
Similar to Callaghan’s Minneapolis video, this guerilla-style coverage of Portland received wide-spread applause. Except from the last group he expected to box him in: Doing Things Media, the company who had backed All Gas No Brakes from the get-go.
And with a single statement on his Instagram story, Andrew Callaghan revealed that he had lost control of the show he had grown from teenage hitchhiking zine to a full-scale media juggernaut.
Part IV: Meet People Where They’re At
I won't go into too much detail regarding how Andrew lost the show because to tell you the truth, it's been covered already by journalists like The New York Times’ Taylor Lorenz.
The New York Times covered how Callaghan lost the show.
The key thing that emerged from reporting, however, was that Doing Things wanted him to avoid covering news and politics while sticking to humor. When Callaghan disagreed, the company locked him and his co-producers out of their accounts. All of the content and intellectual property, gone overnight.
This brand of journalism only worked with the man in the tacky suit, however, and his team behind him. Which is why a month later, Callaghan and his crew returned with a new venture, an independent media company in its own right: Channel 5.
But there’s more to unpack here, as there’s plenty of other journalists who are doing incredible work. For example, the Minneapolis Star Tribune received a Pulitzer, one of journalism’s most prestigious awards, for its extensive coverage of the same George Floyd protests Callaghan filmed.
And yet, America's overall trust in the news media is continuing to erode. There are plenty of confounding factors at play here, of course, with partisanship and misinformation leading the charge. Nevertheless, I still think we can learn from Callaghan’s journey in creating a successful media entity.
First, Callaghan’s commitment to independence after the debacle with Doing Things allows him to retain creative control over the stories he tells and the events he pursues. His on-the-ground reporting of real people running rampant in our country is clearly bringing viewers in the door, and he doesn’t have to answer to any institutional hierarchies.
Second, while Callaghan clearly has a bias — and edits his videos to optimize for comedic timing — he asks informal, open-ended questions to meet people where they're at. This creates trust with his interviewees, letting them become the story and not him. Upon opening up about his frustration after the murder of George Floyd, a man from Minneapolis said this to the journalist as the cameras rolled:
“I appreciate you actually listening and giving us an outlet and a platform to speak how we feel, bro.”
A man thanks Callaghan for giving him a platform to speak openly.
That trust permeates to his audience, too. Andrew has the unique ability to bring people together in the YouTube comments section, as evidenced by the overwhelming support he garners on his videos.
Third, Callaghan has been able to take the stories he tells and the trust he’s gained and build a successful brand. Since launching Channel 5, they're over a million subscribers in just 6 months. Their work is completely funded by patrons on Patreon, brand deals with Cash App, and fans buying merchandise. Through trials and tribulations, the journalist's vision is becoming a reality — down to the universe he's creating with wacky characters and a custom news van.
Of course, as a white male, Callaghan does have privileges that not all journalists share. Viewers might see how he once ate a blunt on camera with a man wearing a “Keep America Great” hat, as well as film inside a store as it was looted. Yet CNN’s Omar Jiminez, an Afro-Latino journalist, was arrested for simply doing his job, reporting near the site of protests in Minneapolis.
Another lesson I think we can learn is to maybe take a hard look at how we package things, gatekeeping the nuances in which we communicate complicated topics. Callaghan critiqued this process best himself:
"Only, like, the lamest creators analyze themselves, package it with buzz words, and distribute it. I just go outside, put a suit on, and talk to people."
Nevertheless, as the world becomes more and more digitized, maybe it is the role of funny people to inform us. As Stewart noted, the satire only works if the “professionals” are doing their jobs, adapting to their audiences’ needs.
To tie this whole thing together is my main point. When it comes to determining how we consume our modern day media, why can’t we put our faith in a journalist wearing a hoodie, driving around the country in an RV and uploading his version of the news onto YouTube?
At the end of his interview with Vice, Callaghan had this to say:
“I just want people to feel like there’s humor in darkness. Because we’re in, like, a really bad time. I just want to show people how crazy things actually are in a really objective way that’s, like, quick and easy to digest. And pretty funny, because you learn better when you’re laughing at stuff.”
I’m not sure about you, but I tend to agree with him there.
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