We Made It A Year

A year into building Nick Valencia News, I’m still getting used to the feeling of being seen for exactly who I am.

By Nick Valencia | July 6, 2026

ATLANTA— Last year around this time, I was still in the mindset of being somebody else’s correspondent.

I had spent 19 years at CNN, never quite able to shake the sense that I didn’t belong.

It still sounds crazy to type, but there was always a chip on my shoulder. There was this feeling that my background was somehow a liability in a newsroom full of people who went to private schools and had parents with college degrees.

Over the years there, I gravitated towards the people in the newsroom, who had backgrounds like mine. There weren’t many. Especially when it came to the people on TV and the ones making the decisions.

My father tried to get me ready for this world. So did my mom. I think together, one of the things that they really agreed on was the belief that a college degree was the only thing standing between our family and real success.

As hard as my dad tried, he never quite felt like he made it. And when he died he left us in debt. Real debt. The kind that shapes your entire life. This is to say, I didn’t come from a pedigree or even have college savings. I came from Eagle Rock. My parents weren’t anybody with influence. And as I came of age as an adult, for the longest time, I thought that was something for which I needed to apologize.

Today, things are starting to become different. Today, I am part of a collective of Black and Brown voices refusing the mainstream’s gatekeeping. Today, the very things I once carried as baggage have become the reason for NVN’s moral clarity. That became evident last week, when the National Press Club called to interview me for an article about the work we’re doing at NVN.

They asked me if I believed NVN was ushering in a new type of journalism. Are we helping to transform journalism?

What I am doing shouldn’t be revolutionary, but it is. And here’s what I think people actually see: authenticity in a landscape built on performance. A voice that came up outside the system, worked within it for two decades and is now operating entirely on its own terms.

I have not done it alone.

Over the last 13 months, I’ve been helped by people who understood what we were building before the metrics could prove it. Victoria Hopkins and Jim LeMay, who had a plan for me to hit the ground running as an independent, including getting an LLC and a company email, things I didn’t even consider. Then there was Erik Sandoval, our EP for five months, who helped us with our identity: Solo El Pueblo Salva Al Pueblo: Only The People Will Save Each Other. Roger Baldowski helped with our logo design and told me to lean into my rawness and grit. Then there is Natalie Hernandez, who’s offered spiritual support as much as logistical support, walking with me through the strange vertigo of shedding an identity as a CNN reporter and becoming who I was always meant to be.

And of course, there is Rachel, my wife. NVN isn’t bigger than the two of us. Without her, I’d be lost.

But the real shift happened when I stopped trying to fit into the mainstream and started leaning fully into the person I was already written to be.

I see it in the view counts, sure. 4.1 million views on Facebook in the last 30 days, another 1.9 million on Instagram…more than 120 million altogether since launch. But more than that, I feel it in person. When I went to Minneapolis, a city that’s not my own, you made me feel at home. You told me my reporting matters. You showed me why. I believe you.

Yes, I went back. That’s what happens when we go back. We rarely go back. And I want NVN to be different. I wanted to see what had shifted, what was happening after the initial moment passed. I wanted to be part of the remedy of where do we go from here. That’s the opposite of how this industry has always worked. That’s accountability to place and a service-based mindset.

The audience knows the difference between performance and presence. They know when you’re being yourself versus playing a role you were never built for. And when I stopped performing and let my background, my voice, my particular way of seeing the world be the thing that anchored my journalism instead of something to overcome, everything changed.

These institutions recognizing us now, they’re not celebrating despite where I come from. They’re celebrating because of it. Because accountability journalism, real frontline, rooted-in-place journalism, cannot come from anywhere else.

It comes from people who know what it means to not be heard. It comes from people willing to go back.

My father never felt like he made it. But maybe this is what success actually looks like: building something with people who believe in you before the world does, and then watching that world slowly catch up to what was always true.

I really believe, it was already written.