Inspiring Conversations with Nick Valencia of Nick Valencia News

Today we’d like to introduce you to Nick Valencia.

Hi Nick, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I’m Nick Valencia and Atlanta is my home. It wasn’t always, but it is now, and we’re not going anywhere. I was born and raised in LA. Not the Los Angeles you’re probably think of when you close your eyes. My version involved immigrant families, a huge Asian and predominately Filipino influence, and of course, cholos. I grew up in a good family, but thought I was a lot better off than I was. Probably because by comparison, I was. It wasn’t until my dad died that my life really opened up to the real world. One of the gifts my dad gave me before he died was helping me realize what I was meant to be when I grew up.
I really wanted to be a professional ice hockey player when I grew up. Wayne Gretzky’s move to the LA Kings in 1992 had a Chicano kid from Northeast LA playing ice hockey. But there are no 5’9 Mexicans in the NHL. At least there weren’t back then. So I did the next best thing I was good at: writing. My high school English teacher was a writer for Rolling Stone Magazine and he was cool. He encouraged my writing and the next thing I knew I was the sports editor for my high school newspaper. That turned into a career.
I applied to USC because they had a great journalism school. But they didn’t accept me. They waitlisted me. I appealed but that was denied. And then when my dad died, I was starting to consider beginning that fall semester of 2001 at Glendale Community College.
Two days after he died, I went to the mailbox and found a USC welcome packet for the Fall of 2001. I called the USC admissions office thinking it was a mistake. It wasn’t. The lady on the other end barely finished saying, “Welcome to the Trojan Family” before I was thinking my dad outloud for the miracle I was listening to on the other end of the phone.
When I got to USC, journalism pulled me in. Life was kind of a dream for the next four years. That was during our USC Football dynasty. By total coincidence, Matt Lienart was my roomate and unrelated to our friendship, I ended up getting a job with the USC Video department traveling the country with the team. We won national championships and I was there to film it all.
Sports was life for me until I went to Bilbao, Spain, for a study abroad semester spring 2004. It changed my life. It was then I decided to switch my journalism focus from sports to news. When I got back to ‘SC, my a Annenberg advisor and professors encouraged my choice, and I never looked back.
Los Angeles gave me as much as it could. After I graduated in the spring of 2005, I followed my heart after falling in love with a woman who I met in Spain who was from Minnesota. Together we camped across the country on our way to Minneapolis. Anything for the story, at 20-years-old I felt like one of my then idols Jake Kerouac. That summer was spent living like a bum as I bounced around from one blue-collar-job to another before finally landing a good job at Borders Bookstore. One day, I was kicked out of where I was living. I moved back home defeated, but it was my first clear lesson that things happen for us, not to us.s
Soon after arriving back in LA, my cousin was on a flight with a drunk CNN radio correspondent who had too much to drink on a layover. She fell when she got on the plane and dropped her purse, spilling out her CNN badge. Serendipity put her seat next to my cousin and for the next four hours on the cross country flight he pitched to hire me.
I went through the interviews, wrote the essays and news quizzes, and on Valentines Day 2006, CNN called to offer me a job as a teleprompter operator.
At my going away party, my cousin said, “Nicholas, I may have helped get you in the door, but you have to walk yourself down the hallway.”
For 19 years I did.
I walked the hallway, opened doors, and sometimes kicked down a few more, some for me and a lot more for others.
Atlanta give me my career, my wife, and my kids. It’s here where I have built what I am most proud of: my family. I married an Atlanta girl and over the course of the last 20 years, she’s helped me understand why Atlanta Influences Everything. I moved here to try to influence the world through journalism at CNN.
From March 6, 2006 to June 1, 2025, I did.
For the first 7 years, I worked just about every job off-camera, before getting the break of my life in 2013 when I became a national correspondent based at the CNN World Headquarters. I’m one of only a few in company history who can say they went from working the teleprompter to becoming a TV correspondent. It was a job that took me all over the world, and paid me to do what I love: tell people’s stories. And that’s the way it was until June 1, 2025. Two weeks later, I began my independent journalist era. I’m the happiest I’ve ever been, and have the most engaged audience.
Together we have built something special. It’s so exciting to be doing something I never thought I’d be doing, making an impact in ways I never imagined.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It’s weird to be in an industry where success is often measured because we did great covering someone’s worst day. There have been a lot of bad days in the last year, especially when it comes to social justice and civil rights. In January, our platform went viral for my coverage of the death of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, as well as the detention of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos.
One of the challenges of the time we’re living in is the distrust in news. Part of the distrust is the idea of objectivity. We cannot be objective. There is no such thing. My metric for success as a journalist is fairness. I can have a good faith conversation with someone who I fundamentally disagree with, and exchange ideas. I see the job of a journalist to get at the prevailing wisdom of a story. We are the umpires who call the balls and strikes. But we are not robots. Our greatest qualities are that we are each shaped by our own personal experience, strength and hope. I try to lean into that. The motto at NVN is to be truthful, not neutral. We do that by being rigorously honest with our audience. This way, when we are transparent and define our bias upfront, we don’t have to argue about the facts. We can truly exchange ideas and learn. That is the only way as we say in Spanish que Solo El Pueblo Salva Al Pueblo. Only the people will save each other.

We’ve been impressed with Nick Valencia News, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
In the last year, Nick Valencia News (NVN) has become a blueprint for new media journalists with more than 110 million views and counting since launch. Our work immediately made an impact just a few months after starting, when NVN exposed the substandard conditions at ICE facilities like Alligator Alcatraz. More recently during my visit to Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas, I exposed a measles outbreak that had been undiagnosed for four months. What I’m even more proud of is that in the last year, our reporting on the denial of medical treatment and other mistreatment to detainees has helped reunite at least 8 people with their families who were previously held in ICE custody.
In November 2025, I was acknowledged by the Pew Research Center with an invitation to their first ever New Media Summit. Months later, Reuters Institute featured me on a panel in Mexico City alongside a three other journalists they said were transforming journalism in Latin America.
Our work has been featured in Adweek, and recognized with the Jovita Idar Award in Journalism during the pre-gala events for the White House Correspondents Dinner. And we’re only a year old as of June 12, 2026.

Any advice for finding a mentor or networking in general?
Find someone who sees the vision. And give away what you have to others. For fun and for free. That’s how you get to keep it. Shoutout to my mentors in this Jim Acosta and Don Lemon. Also, a special thanks to Jim LeMay, my former weekend newsroom boss at CNN who was the first call I made after my CNN career ended. He’s been there every step of the way. They all believe in me. Especially Jim Acosta. He’s shown me that consistency is one of the keys to success.
We have to show up, even on days when it’s hard. There are people counting on us. Now more than ever.

Pricing:

• $8 per month
• $50 per year
• $150+ founding member

Contact Info:

• Website: https://nickvalencianews.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nickvalencianews
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nicholesvalencia/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-valencia-ba58ab16/
• Twitter: https://x.com/nickvalencianew
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@nickvalencianews