🌊 The Video That Made Us Journalists

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By Max Frost

“The point of journalism is to hold power to account.”
-Your Typical Journalist

“Stop treating YouTube frat boys with monetized YouTube channels as legitimate journalists.”
-Shawn Lewis, Deputy Mayor of London, Ontario

We get it all: “Frauds!” “Fake journalists!” “Imposters!”...

“Influencers!”

Gasp

“...YouTubers!”  

“Serious people” use the term to degrade, demean, and mock those who have built a following on the world’s most popular video platform. 

“Yah, he’s a YouTuber now.” 

Giggles ensue

“He said he heard it from some…YouTuber.”

Spits

But the joke is on you, Establishment. In 2025, the YouTubers are the serious people. 

Everyone who follows the media knows that YouTubers were starting to mean it. It wasn’t just about pranks or rants anymore. They were shaping minds (Joe Rogan), making billions (MrBeast), exposing frauds (Coffeezilla). They were influencing elections; shaping the conversation. 

There are YouTube superstars, and I think it’s safe to say, many people thought these people were in a league of their own. For everyone else, YouTube was a cute hobby. Maybe you’d even make some money!

Yet YouTubers are much bigger and more powerful than that. Two recent incidents in particular have driven this home, one involving yours truly.

A few months ago, we posted on Instagram that we wanted to shoot a series of videos from Ontario, Canada. We received hundreds of replies. Many were from cities we were familiar with – Toronto, Ottawa, Niagara Falls – but residents of one city with which we were unfamiliar sent a disproportionate number of replies. 

“Come to London, ON. I believe it’s second only to Vancouver for opioid ODs,” one follower wrote. 

“The open drug use in London, Ontario!” wrote another.

London was on our route, so we decided to check it out. What could go wrong?

What we found in London shocked us: In the town center, sidewalks were littered with syringes, and people were shooting up fentanyl. People sat on benches in the heart of downtown, smoking meth or crack. Most of the businesses were gone. One person after another recounted the downtown’s decline and how they would no longer let their children come here. In the midst of one conversation on the main street, an ambulance pulled up to treat an apparent overdose. 

We took some advice and headed up Dundas Street, the main thoroughfare, where we encountered more open-air drug use than we’d ever seen before. A woman approached us with a handful of meth, offering us some. A man talked to us and then turned away to exhale, “So I don’t blow my fentanyl smoke in your face.” A prostitute fellated a man in a car; a man sat on the ground with a gash in his leg; a woman passing by in a wheelchair told us that she kept her kids inside so they don’t “come out and see this!”

Amid this, a local man – a high school teacher – sat in his car, handing out water bottles. 

“What we’re doing to these people isn’t right,” he told us. “It’s like assisted suicide, except it’s sponsored by the government.”

A block away was what looked to be a gorgeous neighborhood. A man there – who turned out to be a Roca reader! – was taking a walk and told us how this part of London had gone downhill. 

“We’ve pretty much been a doormat for the city,” he told us. “At the end of the day, it’s not a district problem, it’s not a community problem, it’s a city problem.”

In the park – beautiful, with kids playing and a new playground – a woman ran out to pick up needles that someone had spotted. 

“They’re not going to come and there’s kids playing there right now!” she said. “This is why I’m moving to a small town! I’m taking my son back there. He’s five. He shouldn’t have to see stuff like this.”

A man on a nearby porch recounted how a man had once charged him with a syringe, in front of the police: “They just let him poke, and away he went!”

We couldn’t believe what we encountered here. It was dystopian. Having been to many notoriously drug-infested places – Portland, Oregon; Kensington, Philadelphia; The Tenderloin, San Francisco – we had never seen something like this. No one cared about us or our camera. Open-air drug use was fully normalized. There was no consequence. 

Back in New York, we took our footage and packaged it into a video: “Inside Canada’s Zombie Capital.” 

“The fact is that most Londoners have left the downtown area behind,” I concluded. “They’ve moved to clean, prosperous neighborhoods in the outskirts. For them Dundas [the drug zone] is a world away.”

Outside our New York City office is one of the largest fake-goods markets in the US, on Manhattan’s Canal Street. To tourists, it’s an attraction; to us, it’s an immense hassle: Every day, we walk past the vendors, almost all African men, as they take up the sidewalk to hawk their wares. The block is the nemesis of fast-walking New Yorkers on their way to work (or anyone who doesn’t want to be accosted on the street). The market is a tourist attraction and part of the local charm, but it’s also blatantly illegal and a nuisance. You can’t work in the area and not, at least occasionally, want it gone. 

A couple of weeks after we returned from Canada, a YouTuber named Nick Shirley released a video from Canal Street. In it a vendor approaches Nick and screams at him to go away, cursing at him and threatening him with violence. A vendor then grabs his camera while another one punches his cameraman in the head. 

The video was posted on September 25. In the weeks that followed, Nick was invited to speak at the White House, was brought on an ICE raid, and interviewed Attorney General Pam Bondi. Successive videos of his went viral, pulling in tens of millions of views.

Then, on October 21, ICE raided the Canal Street market. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted on X: “NEW YORK’S CANAL STREET IS SAFER: 9 illegal aliens arrested have violent rap sheets including robbery, burglary, domestic violence, assaulting law enforcement, counterfeiting, drug trafficking, drug possession, and forgery.”

DHS proceeded to post images and rap sheets for those detained. The first picture appeared to be the man who screamed at Shirley in the video. The post read:

Did Shirley trigger the raid? Are YouTubers still a joke? 

A week before the raid, a follower from London, Ontario DM’d us to let us know that the city’s deputy mayor had released a podcast in reaction to our YouTube video. It was entitled, “Debunking ‘zombie’ clickbait in London’s core.”

Throughout the episode, the mayor and his host mock us “YouTubers” and accuse us of spreading “fake news.” 

“Stop. Treating. YouTube Frat boys with monetized YouTube channels as legitimate journalists.”

You could practically hear the snaps in the background. Yass mayor!

But Deputy Mayor Lewis then made the mistake of posting the episode to his Facebook page, with the caption, “Debunking the ‘zombie London’ clickbait videos and talking about the realities of Urban Growth.”

The replies surely weren’t what he expected. 

A Londoner named Chris replied: “Clickbait hahahaha, pretty accurate depiction if you ask me, someone who works downtown everyday.”

Then Michael: “Take off the blinders! Just because its worse in other cities we are suppose to be thankful?? Do better Shawn Lewis.”

And Mildrede: “How is it clickbait? The video is accurate. This is every day in London. Does nobody on council ever actually get out into the city, or are you all still trying to sweep it under the rug and hope it goes away?”

And Angela: “Stop gaslighting us. Everyone can see what is going on in this city. Pretending it isn't happening doesn't make it go away. We are not getting our money's worth from this council.”

Chad: “Nothing click bait about those videos. As a downtown resident all those videos are accurate. It's time for council & city of london to do something. Your current model is not working.”

Then Corey: “Wow, this is not a good look for you. We all see it with our very eyes and it's troubling you don't. I haven't been able to travel down dundas without seeing pipes or needles or people literally shooting up…I always wondered how it got this bad, now we know the people that can actually help think this is all ok.”

And, finally, John: “I'm hoping you could clarify one of your remarks by answering a simple question: What is it that makes [podcast co-host] Craig Needles a ‘legitimate journalist’ and Roca News... not?”

Because POWER said so, John! Duh!

A journalist’s job is “holding power to account,” right? And isn’t that what we did when we posted our video about London? Or when Shirley posted his about Canal Street?

Imposters! Frauds!

Give me a break. We YouTubers are…journalists!

Editor’s Note

Thank you for reading. We wrote this story based on your feedback to last Sunday’s essay. We’re planning to run essays like this each Sunday moving forward. As always, we want and depend on your feedback. 

Thanks to those who wrote in yesterday about sports betting. Sharing an interesting email below.

Nick from Washington wrote in:

And don’t miss out on our recent articles if you haven’t read them yet:

Thanks for reading. See you tomorrow.
—Max and Max