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In a recent TikTok video, Lisa Remillard, a/k/a “The News Girl,” told viewers that she had an update for them about a riveting topic: the federal debt ceiling. “The US is inching closer and closer to defaulting on our massive thirty-six trillion dollars of debt,” she said, leaning into the camera dramatically. This, she explained, “would have catastrophic consequences for not just the US government but also for you and me.”
The tone of the clip is breezy; throughout, Remillard maintains a placid smile, looking directly into the camera and punctuating important points with the kind of hand gestures I associate with the morning news. (Remillard was, in fact, a news anchor for more than fifteen years). It’s not exactly the kind of video for which TikTok is famous; there’s no choreography or Gen Z slang. Still there’s something in the vibe of the video that is unmistakably TikTok, with its casual jump cuts and slightly unpolished graphic overlays. To be successful on social media, Remillard explained to me recently, “you really have to understand the tone of the platform.”
At this, she has been exceptionally successful: at time of writing, the debt ceiling clip had been viewed 1.6 million times, and Remillard’s account had 3.7 million followers. But when she posted her first news video, back in 2020, she was skeptical as to whether anything would come of it at all. A couple of years earlier, she had begun hosting a news talk show on BEONDTV, a streaming platform she cofounded in 2018 with a fellow news anchor, Carlos Amezcua. Remillard started the project after stints in local newsrooms across the country, including at stations in Tallahassee, Tampa, Las Vegas, and San Diego. In 2019 she invited a TikTok influencer onto her BEONDTV show and was surprised when he encouraged her to start her own channel on the platform. “I was like, I am way too old for that,” she told me. TikTok was still relatively new, she said, and mostly featured “little kids dancing.” But the idea of reaching a social media audience intrigued her. She downloaded the app and quickly noticed what she saw as a gaping hole: “Nobody was doing news on TikTok at the time,” she said. Remillard created a short video about a Trump travel ban, and the response was overwhelming. “It got sixty thousand views,” Remillard told me. “I’d been anchoring the news for years at that point, and I’d never seen anything with sixty thousand views.” She didn’t need more convincing. “I was like, This is it. I’m going all in.”
Since then, Remillard has posted regular videos in which she dives into complex topics—the consumer price index, ICE raids, Trump’s rescissions package—to a deeply engaged audience that comments prodigiously. She focuses on federal politics, with a particular eye toward topics that affect her audience directly. This, she said, is one of the reasons for her success; her content is relatable, giving viewers the tools they need to form their own opinions. Recently, I spoke with Remillard about tailoring content for TikTok, diversifying revenue streams, and what she wishes legacy media understood about social media. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. (And when you’re done reading, check out a similar recent interview that I did with Kelsey Russell, who has a different perspective on reading the news on TikTok.)
YRG: Before starting your TikTok channel, you spent years in local newsrooms. What is the biggest difference you found between being an anchor on TV and running a news account on social media?
LR: [In addition to] the sheer volume of views, my audience on social media is more engaged. People have no problem telling me what they think and asking questions. They feel more able to reach out and talk to me, and it makes me feel connected to this audience in a way that I never could be on television. A couple of weeks ago, I was really sick and [wasn’t able to post]. While I was away, people were losing it: Where are you? Are you okay? Have you left us? We need you! I’ve never seen so many messages in my life, which is lovely. It’s something that never would have happened while I was on TV. I would take vacation all the time, and I’d get nothing. It didn’t matter.
How do you feel about the term “influencer”? Do you consider yourself in such terms?
The term grates on my soul. I call myself a journalist—it’s as simple as that. To be a journalist, you can’t be an influencer: those two things don’t go together. There are news commentators, and there are many of those people on the internet; maybe you could call them news influencers. But what I do is what everybody at the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Times, or reporting the news on television is doing. I just happen to do it on the internet. I feel like it’s my duty through my page to continue to remind people that this is what real journalism is, and this is what journalists do. We’re not your enemy. We’re not here to feed you propaganda. We’re here to stand in the middle and tell you what’s happening, whether you like it or not, whether it conforms with your opinions or not.
How do you choose what topics you want to cover?
I’m my own newsroom. I do everything by myself: I do all the reporting, sourcing, writing, shooting, editing, and graphics. Plus, I write a newsletter every single night. I realized very early on that I have to put up guardrails on what I cover. I decided that the only stories I would [focus on] would be federal government stories that impact everybody: What is the president doing, what is the administration doing, what are Congress and the Supreme Court doing? I don’t get involved in state issues ever, because if I do it for one state, then somebody’s going to say, Well, why don’t you do it for my state? And then all of a sudden I’m covering every story in the world. So I ask myself: Is this within my [purview]? Is it a story that will impact a majority of people in my audience? And is it interesting? If I feel like it’s one of those stories that I have to force [into those categories], then I know it’s not going to perform well, and I don’t have time to produce content that isn’t going to perform well.
What are the things that make a news segment work on social media?
[It’s important] to understand the communication style of whatever social media platform you’re posting on. I’ve seen newsrooms try to force-feed the packages they’ve put together onto social media, to shoehorn them in and hope that they’ll work. But the reality is that the package that you put together for broadcast news is not going to play well on social media; the format just doesn’t translate. On TV, you use words and phrases that elevate the story. That [approach] will destroy you on social media. I don’t mean to say that you should talk down to people, but you have to use the tone you would use in your everyday life. My followers always say things like, Why can’t the real news do it like you do? Which I find hilarious, because I am “the real news.” But I understand what they’re saying: I’m presenting complicated, hardcore issues in a way that they can understand, in a way that they find relatable. That’s what people are craving. If you want to succeed on social media, you need to do research into the platforms. How are the people who are successful talking? What do their videos look like? What do their edits look like? It can’t be an afterthought.
One of the ways many social media accounts monetize themselves is with sponsorship deals. Have you been approached by advertisers? How do you handle that?
I accepted one sponsorship from a media organization about five years ago, but since then I haven’t taken any advertising money. I would never sit behind the anchor desk and say, Try my vacuum!, so why, if I’m a journalist, would I do that [on my channel]? Of course, that takes away a huge revenue stream that people with a platform my size benefit from, and my friends who aren’t journalists and who have large audiences like mine are always telling me that I’m insane. But this is how I was trained as a journalist, and I’m not doing things differently just because it’s on social media. It’s hard, but I’m not going to jeopardize the trust my audience has in me.
So how do you monetize?
I had a business coach right after I left local news who told me that you never want to put your livelihood in the hands of someone else’s algorithm. So the business model is this: find as many revenue streams as you can. I’ve made sure to diversify my content on strategic platforms that pay me through their creator programs. I’ve taken advantage of the subscription models that those platforms have offered, where people can pay to be part of my platform. Another key is to be able to have contact with the people who like your work and want to support you. So that’s why I also have an email list, which [I’ve converted into] a Substack. It can be scary. I didn’t make any money for probably two years doing this. You have to be willing to take a hit financially when you’re first getting started. But if you have a good business mind and you have enough discipline to do this every single day, and to consistently turn in good work, then it might be worth the effort.
Do you see social media as the future of journalism?
At this point, I have as much impact or more by posting online than [I would if I were broadcasting on] any news network—name any one. So social media may not be the way forward, but it’s definitely a big piece of it. I’ve been in enough newsrooms to know that they don’t like to move, and I get that [pivoting] is hard and that it can be expensive. But in this environment, you have to do it, or you’re going to get left behind. [I see part of my work as] trying to pull legacy media kicking and screaming into this new way [of doing things] so they can keep up and not die.
I would love for legacy media not to look down on those of us who do this work on social media. We’re breaking important news. We have the base and the following, and we’re getting the message out in a way that they’re not. What I would say to them is that we are not your enemy; in fact, most of the people who do what I do came from legacy media. We love legacy media. We all want it to continue and to thrive and to grow and to succeed. And so I would say work with us, not against us, so we can all move the profession forward.
A programming note: The Columbia Journalism Review is off tomorrow for Juneteenth. Throughout this week, we have been thinking about racism, journalism, and repeating cycles of history. As our colleague Jon Allsop has written, we have been watching police officers brutally attack reporters in Southern California, at protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement hunting down and deporting undocumented people. According to the US Press Freedom Tracker, there have been at least sixty incidents of violence and other types of aggression against members of the media in Los Angeles. And there have been ten more incidents elsewhere across the United States. Consider Mario Guevara, a reporter in Atlanta focused on immigration raids, who was arrested at a protest over the weekend, charged with obstruction of law enforcement, improper entry onto a roadway, and unlawful assembly. He wore a vest identifying himself as press and told an officer, “I’m a member of the media.” He now faces deportation.
Jon remarked that the assaults on journalists recall the summer of 2020, when, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police, demonstrators poured out in support of Black lives. The coverage had a mixed record—“focusing excessively on related violence and destruction (when the protests were mostly peaceful) or using passive language that softened descriptions of police-perpetrated abuses,” as Jon noted—and we can observe some of the same tendencies now. “These reports overemphasize spurts of conflict and damaged property at the expense of explaining the impact on people, their grievances, and why these mass protests are happening: The nature of the ICE raids,” Beatrice Forman wrote in The Objective. Last week, The Emancipator’s Jamil Smith considered what that means for responsible journalism. “I turn 50 later this year, and racism is more conspicuous in American life than at any other moment in my lifetime,” he observed. “The latest example, of course, is playing out before our eyes: a violent, militarized, and autocratic response to people protesting ICE’s kidnapping of their immigrant family members, neighbors, and colleagues, targeting Democratic-led states and communities in particular.” He added, “Too many journalists and media outlets continue to treat the horror of systemic and individual racism as if it were still somehow uncanny, a mysterious and ethereal force that cannot be properly quantified or described—let alone properly covered.”
For CJR, Feven Merid has examined the vocabulary of race—“obfuscating euphemisms for racism, oppression, and inequality,” including in our magazine over the years. Cycles repeat. But they don’t always have to.
Other notable stories:
- In other news about TikTok, the Trump administration confirmed yesterday that it will allow the app to continue operating in the US at least through September, despite Congress having voted to ban it unless it separates from its Chinese owner. (“This is just a wild situation that we’re in,” one expert told the Times. “The president has essentially nullified a law because he doesn’t like it.”) Elsewhere in Washington, we’re not much closer to knowing for sure whether Trump will bomb Iran than we were when yesterday’s newsletter went to press, and MAGA pundits are still bickering about the prospect. (Tucker Carlson, who is very against it, forced Senator Ted Cruz to concede that he doesn’t know how many people live in Iran.) And Punchbowl News reckons that the House-passed cuts for NPR and PBS don’t yet have the votes to pass the Senate.
- Erik Wemple, the Washington Post media critic, assessed a rush of recent stories featuring interviews with Trump voters who now regret their choice. (“He voted for Trump. Then [INSERT CATASTROPHE].”) Polling data suggests that there is no widespread “‘regret’ crisis” among Trump voters, Wemple writes, but “tales of Trump voters with misgivings don’t need to be part of a massive data surge to merit news coverage. They’re newsworthy because of the details.” There’s also an audience for such stories, he observes. “The legacy media outlets that have stacked up these Trump-voter laments rely on audiences that skew leftward. And when liberal readers catch wind of a story that activates their I-told-you-so impulses, the clicks cascade.”
- Yesterday, Eric Adams, the mayor of New York City, banned Chris Sommerfeldt, a reporter at the Daily News, from his weekly press conferences; Sommerfeldt, who has not been called to ask a question in more than three months, tried to do so yesterday, only for Adams to brand him “disrespectful.” The Freedom of the Press Foundation hit back. “What can we say about Eric Adams that a grand jury hasn’t already said?” the group wrote, referring to corruption charges that the Trump administration controversially dropped. “Not much, but here’s something: He’s a thin-skinned bully who apparently can’t handle unexpected questions from the press without throwing a tantrum.”
- Also yesterday, lawmakers voted to put an end to women in England and Wales being criminally prosecuted for having an unlawful abortion. (People who assist such abortions can still be prosecuted.) The UK edition of Cosmopolitan was among the groups to have sought the change. “Working across this campaign has shown us here at Cosmopolitan UK how many of you are passionate about the right to access,” the magazine wrote, before acknowledging that there is more to do. “We will keep reporting on this topic and fighting for change, as we have done since our inception over 50 years ago.”
- And William Langewiesche, a prominent magazine writer, has died. He was seventy. Langewiesche was once dubbed “the Steve McQueen of American journalism,” with reference to his “muscular prose style and often gripping subject matter,” the Times writes in an obituary. He “chose to write often about calamitous events,” especially in the aviation space, drawing on his background as a professional pilot. (His German-born father “taught him to fly before the boy could see over the instrument panel.”)
Correction: An earlier version of this post misstated the dollar figure for the US debt as conveyed by Remillard on TikTok. The figure she cited was thirty-six trillion dollars.
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