For years, Dave Jorgenson has been nearly synonymous with The Washington Post on social media. He has been a familiar bearded face of the brand on TikTok and YouTube, dropping into users’ feeds to crack wise about elections, wars and business news for millions of followers.

So, what would The Post do if Mr. Jorgenson left? And can he be a star without The Post? Both are about to find out.

Mr. Jorgenson, 34, is leaving The Post next month to start an online video company based on his personal YouTube channel, Local News International, which blends the topical wit of “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” with the surreal antics of Ron Burgundy, the fictional star of “Anchorman.” Joining him are two former colleagues: Micah Gelman, who until recently was The Post’s director of video, and Lauren Saks, Mr. Gelman’s former deputy.

Mr. Jorgenson’s break with The Post is the latest test of whether a journalist’s personal brand can thrive when it is detached from a nationally known newsroom with huge online reach. Other journalists have left traditional journalism to start their own businesses on Substack and YouTube, with varying degrees of success.

But Mr. Jorgenson is betting that many of the people who signed up to watch him on The Post’s channels — which have more than three million subscribers across two YouTube accounts and 1.9 million followers on TikTok — will follow him to his new venture. The goal of the new business, he said, is to provide a “sanity check” for news consumers on social media.

“The reason I didn’t do this three years ago or four years ago is that there was a fear of failure,” he said. “But I’m not as scared of failing anymore.”

Mr. Jorgenson, a former intern on “The Colbert Report,” joined The Post eight years ago after working gigs as a barista at Starbucks and a producer at a digital media start-up, IJR (the pay was similar, he joked). He was held up as a success story inside The Post, as a model for the power of the publication to build personal brands. He racked up hundreds of thousands of subscribers for The Post’s commentary and satire account, a following he can’t take with him. Mr. Jorgenson’s personal YouTube account, Local News International, has a small fraction of that.

Mr. Jorgenson is one of several prominent journalists taking a buyout that The Post is offering; others include Dan Balz, a longtime political reporter, and Ann Marimow, who covers the Supreme Court. Will Lewis, The Post’s chief executive, sent an email this month encouraging employees to consider the buyout if they weren’t “aligned” with the company’s plans, a memo that Mr. Jorgenson said was essentially “rolling out the red carpet” for his resignation.

The Post is trying to promote star talent on social media through WP Ventures, a division that is supposed to be an incubator for innovative ideas. Mr. Jorgenson said he had decided to leave, in part, because of what he described as an “inconsistent vision” at The Post and staff changes that made it unclear where his colleagues in graphics and audio would be in the coming months.

“I am just not convinced that they have the best road map right now,” he said. (Mr. Jorgenson is one of three contributors to The Post’s TikTok channel, alongside Joseph Ferguson and Carmella Boykin.)

A spokeswoman for The Post declined to comment.

Mr. Jorgenson and the other two Post alumni are betting on the rising power of news creators, such as Cleo Abram and Matt Yglesias, who have left newsrooms for digital platforms like Substack and YouTube. In addition to his own video channel, Mr. Jorgenson’s business — called Family Loser — will provide strategy and ad sales consulting for other video creators who are interested in taking similar steps. Mr. Jorgenson and his co-founders are paying for their new venture out of pocket for now but are in early discussions with some funders.

Ideas for future videos include a “get ready with me” makeup tutorial in which Mr. Jorgenson explains the news in character as Vice President JD Vance and a series in which Mr. Jorgenson adopts a highway for Family Loser.

Though he will hold on to several running jokes from his time at The Post — his eerie similarity to Mr. Vance will be a recurring theme, as will a character made from a Spam can — he plans to shed some newsroom conventions. Close scrutiny of the word “lie,” a holdover from The Post’s previous editor, Martin Baron, is gone, along with the use of state abbreviations to conform with Associated Press style. (“I’ve had to repost a whole TikTok because I didn’t abbreviate California correctly,” Mr. Jorgenson said.)

But some things won’t change. Mr. Jorgenson, who lives in Kansas City, Mo., said he wanted to avoid tailoring his content to any political party or politician. When he filmed videos from the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last year, he said, he was pleasantly surprised that conservatives approached and said they followed The Post’s account.

“I don’t disagree that a lot of stuff that is fact-based is perceived as like center-left or left-of-center,” Mr. Jorgenson said. “I’m just very much going toward my own moral compass, whatever that is — you know, Midwestern son of Presbyterians.”