Natt Garun
Managing Editor, YouTube Official Blog
Showing a major company how to tell stories about itself
Natt Garun is the managing editor of YouTube Official Blog, where YouTube publishes company news and stories about its creators.
Garun grew up in Bangkok, Thailand. Her father passed away when she was 7. To be closer to relatives and start a new life, Garun’s mother moved the family to New York.
Her career in journalism began at the newspaper club at her high school, which at the time was the only school in her area specializing in technology. After studying magazine journalism in college, she worked on the tech beat for Gizmodo, Business Insider, the Next Web, and the Verge. Garun then jumped to video journalism at Bloomberg. Now at YouTube, Garun draws from all her previous experiences in online publishing, magazine journalism and video journalism to find the hidden stories of the many artists that make up the YouTube community.
By Agnes Cheung
Before I started working at YouTube, I thought that the blog was just a place where journalists went to get company updates.
My current role is the first job I’ve had where everything comes at me in every direction. I am part of the corporate communications department. Other teams in the company loop me in to use the blog as a component of press coverage. I’m also responsible for the words on the blog, and I manage the technical aspects of it.
I’m fascinated by people’s stories and I enjoy telling them. What I am most interested in are the stories of creators who are just starting out on YouTube — people who are growing and learning, people who haven’t already made it yet. I have creative control when it comes to their stories.
Using Journalistic Instincts in Other Jobs
In August 2022, we published a story about up-and-coming YouTuber Chris Ivan, who shares videos of the “plunger challenge,” where he aims and throws toilet plungers at signs. His channel kept growing and growing.
Ivan stopped at the YouTube headquarters in San Bruno while moving from Oregon to Los Angeles to be a full-time YouTuber. He was hoping to throw plungers at the YouTube sign there, but security said no. A YouTube employee saw what was happening and got security clearance for him. A week later, Ivan put up the video of the plunger challenge at YouTube’s headquarters.
As soon as I heard the murmurs of Ivan’s story, my journalistic instincts kicked in. Usually I would send writers out to get the story, but this one had a short turnaround before the story went stale. I knew I could get it done fast. The first half of my career was built on breaking news, and being really really fast. So I did it myself.
That story probably came together in 36 hours. It was one of the fastest I had ever turned around for YouTube. Everyone I talked with to get the story was really excited to put it together. I didn’t really know this creator as he was not on my radar. But the story became one of our best-performing blog posts. The fact that most people who came to the blog actually read Ivan’s story is an indication to me that people want more of these stories.
I have been a part of an environment in the past where people only care about pageviews. The problem is, journalists can only write so many stories in a day. At some point, the quality would suffer if all that the newsroom cared about were pageviews. Anyone could pay people for follows and clicks, but those are not quality views; those views could not build an audience.
I care, to a degree, that an article performs well and has a decent amount of click-throughs, but what matters most to me is the quality of the audience coming in. How much time did they spend on the page? Did they read the entire article? Those two metrics are my goals to improve on for the blog.
Don’t Think of Marketing as “The Dark Side”
Bloomberg was my first experience where video was my primary job. The Bloomberg video team wanted to build a streaming platform and to grow their YouTube audience. The channel hired video producers with an editing background to make original journalism, and I was brought in as someone with a journalism background to make sure that stories had good journalistic integrity and good angles.
Part of my transition from Bloomberg to this role at YouTube was changing my belief that the writing I produce has to be objective. In brand messaging and corporate communications, there is no objectivity, hence a perception that marketing is” the dark side.”
This job is obviously very different from traditional journalism: to integrate objectivity is really not the goal here, but commitment to the truth still is.
Ivan’s story was a journalistic endeavor to me. Now, does it have ulterior motives to promote the brand? Yes, but I think marketing doesn’t have to be a dirty, dark thing. There are ways to do messaging and storytelling that don’t feel like the brand is knocking somebody over the head with how great the products look or how cool they are. There’s a way to do those things in a subtle and honest way.
My intention for the YouTube blog is to tell stories. I present people with feel-good stories about things that are happening on the blog. The public can make their own opinions and decisions about what they think based on facts — and what I do is present people with those facts.
Compared to traditional journalism, my current role is new. This job is obviously very different from traditional journalism: to integrate objectivity is really not the goal here, but commitment to the truth still is. Companies are realizing that the public sees the value of journalism and the value of having journalists tell stories in an authentic way. That’s still my favorite part of the job, identifying the stories of creators that no one has really written about, getting them on the blog, featuring and highlighting them. I think that those are the true colors of YouTube.