Learning for a Living: Howtown’s Joss Fong Is On a Mission to Reinvent Science Explainer Videos
What do Hot Ones hot sauce and COVID vaccine hesitancy have in common? For video journalist Joss Fong, they’re both opportunities to inject evidence-based science into topics people don’t usually think of as “hard science.” Fong, a video journalist based in Brooklyn is half of the two-person team behind the YouTube channel Howtown, which has amassed an impressive 959 thousand subscribers and over 186 million views since it began in March 2024. Armed with a master’s degree in Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting from New York University and nine years of experience as one of the founders of the Vox video team, she aims to break down complicated topics for a broad audience. Fong spoke with Storybench to discuss her creative production process, working with partner Adam Cole who is based in Bogota, Colombia, the tricky landscape of audience engagement, and her hopes for the future of video explainer journalism.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you and your partner, Adam Cole, connect and eventually develop the idea for Howtown?
We’ve known about each other for a while. Adam used to work at NPR and had a YouTube channel there called Skunk Bear, which was delightful. I lived in D.C. around the same time, so we crossed paths every once in a while on a panel or something. He came on when Vox started a Netflix show called “Explained” and produced a bunch of episodes for that show — really great episodes. We weren’t exactly on the same team, but he was working on the TV show while I was working on the YouTube channel. I got a sense that we were like-minded in our interest in science, but the specific type of science storytelling that focuses on the methods rather than just the characters or the outcomes of the process. So, when I thought about starting a new channel, I immediately knew that he would be a good collaborator for it. Over the course of a year, I convinced him to do it, and that’s how Howtown was born.
When you’re making these videos, what does your creative process look like? Is it very collaborative or do you work independently?
Mostly independently. We take turns publishing videos on our channel, but we appear in each other’s videos as a sort of proxy for the audience. We do that through conversations on Riverside, the software that breaks up the narration with a little bit of unscripted conversation. We bring in someone saying something like, “Hey, Mike, I was confused about this,” or “Could you explain this a little bit more?” Which is not something we did at Vox, but I think it’s really helpful for people. We choose our stories based on our own interests, demand from our audience, and topics we feel are culturally relevant. From there, we jump into about a six-week process for making a feature video.
I’d say half of that is research and reporting — which involves reading a bunch of papers and talking to several researchers. The rest is just all of the processes of making a video, which involves a little bit of on-camera hosting, sometimes some shooting. We don’t go in the field too much, but we do sometimes do little shoots in the cities where we live or in our apartments. We do animations, editing, sound design and then just publish the thing. They’re about 15 to 20-minute explainer videos that are very mixed media and we’re just hands-on across the whole process.
Is there an aspect of that production process that is most enjoyable for you?
The research. That’s the whole reason I like to do this work. I’m not going to tell myself that YouTube videos are changing the world, but I do think we serve an educational purpose in the world. The real reason I do this job is because it allows me to learn for a living, so that process of dipping into a topic that I’ve never looked at before and getting to just email people and say, “can I ask you questions about the thing that you’ve spent your life working on?” And the fact that they say yes to that is a kind of a miracle.
And then I get to take that little knowledge with me for the rest of my life. It’s like a glimpse at a world that is much bigger than the one that I end up covering, but it’s enough of a glimpse that it helps add a puzzle piece to my understanding of the world that I arrived at when I was born and have been trying to comprehend ever since.
I do like editing too, but it’s harder. It involves a lot of poking around with things that are ugly and awkward until they are elegant and compelling — if they even get there, which they don’t always. I find that the very beginning of the process is my favorite.
Did your background in journalism, science and communication create a natural curiosity in you, and does this research satisfy it?
Definitely, yeah. I went to a program designed to train writers, and I switched to video because I got the sense that there was an oversupply of science writers and an undersupply of science video creators. I don’t know if that’s still the case, but this was in 2013. I also find writing really hard, so I thought it would be fun to play with all of these different sides of the medium. My guiding interest and motivating force as a human is to understand how things work. I’m a stickler for facts. I’m extremely frustrated by the amount of information on the internet — most things are overly simplistic, sensationalized, and forced into narratives. I’m driven to add nuance and look for evidence around things.
Is there a specific project or video you guys have done that highlights the research production process that you’re talking about?
I can call out our most popular video, which is an investigation of Hot Ones. We decided to capitalize on the interest in that show and talk about a research method rooted in chemistry and the evolution of this specific plant that’s kind of amazing: hot peppers.
That video was a bit more of a collaboration between Adam and I than normal because he did the research and reporting on why hot peppers are spicy. Meanwhile, I was doing the research and reporting on the hot sauce Scoville side of things, the more investigative part of that video. The visuals were a collaboration between us. The video was a little frivolous, but it allowed us to inject an evidence-based approach into a topic people don’t think of as “hard science.” That and calling them out on their marketing a little bit. Yeah, that was a fun one.
Is that the video that you’re the most proud of?
The work I’m most proud of is at Vox for now. I feel like I’m still getting a handle on what Howtown is and should be. But I would say I’m proud of a video that I made during the pandemic about vaccine polarization, specifically about American conservatives’ hesitancy to get the COVID vaccine. I printed out a series of data visualizations on paper to walk through exactly how we got to the point where this big chunk of the country rejected this life-saving technology. I think if you watch it you’ll see a real good faith effort to understand, rather than something condescending or scolding while being informed by the evidence that existed at the time. A lot of it is survey and mortality data.
I think that combination of things, feeling like I’m scratching my itch of understanding something while also helping other people understand something that matters, like why people were dying when they didn’t need to die, makes me feel proud.
Because you’re covering such a wide range of topics — from hot peppers to vaccines — are you able to gauge the audience reception to your work?
It’s so hard to know. We get a jumbled mix of feedback in the comment section on YouTube, which is not representative of the entire audience. There’s a specific kind of person who leaves comments on YouTube. Other than that, and the occasional email, it’s really hard to know what people think, remember and take away from our work. We have view counts, but we don’t know if someone watched it and liked or disliked it. I’ve always wondered what’s on the other side of this process and how everything is received.
We created a Patreon community and get more detailed feedback from that, but it’s also not representative because they have elected to give us money every month, which is another little miracle of a thing that people do on the internet sometimes. I don’t have an answer to your question, to be honest. All I have is numbers and some comments.
Is there anything we should look out for or any plans that you have?
We don’t have plans. We’ve been up and running for under a year and our growth is better than we expected on the subscriber’s side, but our income is not necessarily there. That’s a big thing that’s new to Adam and me: YouTube has created this TikTok competitor inside their platform. I understand why they did that—I know how compelling and addictive short form videos why so much attention is shifting to that format—but I have a lot of mixed feelings about what it’s doing to people, including myself, and what happens when we end up in a world where people are not proactively choosing what they’re watching. Going forward, a big question for Howtown is how we handle that balance of long form pieces versus these sugar rush type of viral videos that we know how to make and are pretty easy to make. I think what you can look for from us is a real investment in videos that we think earn people’s trust, a continued investment in a smaller community of supporters on Patreon that we feel shielded from the algorithmic forces that determine media consumption today, and a little bit of short form here and there to try to introduce ourselves to new people without getting swept away by that wave.
Chloe Craft is a 20-year-old multimedia journalist specializing in global politics, with experience in a wide range of other topics. She is based in Ireland while working for Irish news outlets through January 2026, after which she will return to Northeastern to complete a degree in Journalism, International Affairs, and Linguistics.
Grace Sawin is a fourth-year journalism and environmental science student at Northeastern University. Through her combined major, she has developed a love for digital journalism and data storytelling as a platform for accurate, verifiable reporting.
