Frontline's YouTube strategy, explained

How a 40-year-old documentary series cracked a new platform

Dec 18, 2025

“Public media is supposed to be in places where the public is talking.”
Raney Aronson-Rath, Executive Producer of Frontline

This week, Evan Shapiro and I bring Raney Aronson-Rath, the executive producer of Frontline and editor-in-chief of documentaries at GBH, on The Media Odyssey Podcast, to unpack how a 40-year-old public broadcasting institution reinvented its distribution strategy and why that matters more than ever right now.

The timing couldn’t be sharper. The BBC just lost two senior leaders over an editing controversy. France Télévisions is fending off attacks from both political flanks. And in the US, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been defunded entirely. Public media is being squeezed from every direction and the margin for error has never been thinner.

Raney isn’t waiting for the storm to pass. She’s been building Frontline into a case study for how legacy journalism can thrive on platforms it once ignored. YouTube now delivers a younger, more global audience than broadcast ever could and she’s unlocked the entire Frontline archive to feed it. Some films have crossed 40 million views.

But this isn’t a pivot away from television, it’s an expansion:

Simultaneous releases across broadcast and streaming;
A new shorts series designed specifically for 18-to-24s;
A theatrical distribution arm launching with Oscar-winning momentum; and
A global self-distribution play when need be.

We also get into the economics, the editorial discipline required to stay credible and why Raney sees documentary filmmaking as built for the streaming era, not threatened by it.

If you care about the future of public media, journalism or documentary storytelling, you can do two things today:

→ Consider donating to Frontline here.

→ Listen to the episode here: APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE.