This speech was originally delivered at the National Press Club in Washington D.C.on Monday, February 9, 2026
Thank you for having me here. To the National Press Club. Thank you to HTTP. Thank you
My name is Nick Valencia.
I’ve been a journalist for more than 20 years.
I came up inside legacy media.
Starting at CNN in 2006 as a teleprompter operator and working my way up the ladder to become a national correspondent.
And then May 2025 happened and we parted ways.
Today, I run an independent newsroom Nick Valencia News. At NVN, we say a lot about a little — focusing on President Trump’s Mass Deportation Policy.
This past month we had more than 30 million views.
We have been successful not only because we have met the moment and met people where they are, but because I have taken the training from traditional media and applied it to a new media landscape desperate for raw reporting and a free press.
My transition gives me a perspective very few people have: I’ve lived inside the old media system, and I now operate fully inside the new one.
And what I’ve learned is that there is a feeling out there among the public—that our journalism institutions have been corrupted, even if many of the journalists working inside them are not.
Things were a lot different when I started in this field.
In 2006, at 22-years-old, I got on a plane from Northeast Los Angeles and moved my entire life to Atlanta. CNN was everything back then. It felt like getting drafted by the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Everyone wanted to work there. And when I landed, I got to work.
I was determined to become one of the youngest correspondents in the network’s history. At 27, I did. For the next 13 years, I crisscrossed this country—city to city, tragedy to tragedy—showing up on people’s worst days. It was a privilege to have a front-row seat to history.
But like all chapters, that one ended.
And another one began— one in which I made the deliberate decision to meet people where they are — on their phones, with character driven storytelling in which it’s not all about me.
I have often said that Things happen for us, not to us—maybe just to survive the moment.
But over the last eight months, I’ve come to believe it. Because losing that institutional cover gave me a front-row seat to a different kind of history.
A darker one.
An era where press freedom itself is being intentionally targeted and dismantled.
We hear all the time that the media landscape is “shifting.”
It’s not shifting.
It’s already shifted.
And while we’re rightly focused on broadcast ownership and consolidation, I’ve learned something else out in the field of new media:
I may have my own platform as an independent journalist —but I still have publishers.
Meta.
Google.
YouTube.
Platforms that quietly decide what reporting is amplified, what disappears, and what never reaches the public at all.
Maintaining journalistic ethics in that environment takes resilience. It takes courage. And it takes community.
It takes believing that we are the 4th estate. Our country can only be free if our press is free.
What happened to me in Minneapolis—being assaulted and deliberately targeted while doing my job—is not unique.
It’s a microcosm of how journalists are being treated, but also of how entire communities are being treated by those with power.
How my community is being treated.
That’s part of why I’m doing what I’m doing — because with all my privilege, being a 3rd generation Mexican-American, a Chicano- to some we will never be seen as anything but foreigners.
I criticize this administration not because I hate this country—but because I love it. Because I believe in Capital J Journalism.
We influence policy.
We change lives.
We hold the powerful accountable.
But here’s the truth: we are powerful too.
And over the last eight months since becoming an independent journalist, I’ve learned to lean into that.
Because journalism is accountability
And journalism at its best, is the ultimate act of service.
We cannot let anything or anyone get in the way of that.
If we don’t go on the record right now about the dangerous direction we’re heading when it comes to press freedom, one day we’ll look up and realize there’s almost none of it left.
Thank you.
