Lisa Remillard, who posts daily news explainer videos on TikTok as “The News Girl.”

Lisa Remillard

Lisa Remillard spent more than 15 years behind the anchor desk, delivering the day’s headlines to viewers in markets from Tallahassee to San Diego. By 2018, she’d left television to co-found a streaming news startup — but her most surprising career turn came two years later, when she traded studio lights and cameras for the snappy, quick-hit rhythm of TikTok and soon found herself talking to the biggest audience of her life.

At first, she thought the app was just “kids dancing.” It was a TikTok influencer, in fact, who’d nudged her to try out the app in the first place. Out of curiosity, she downloaded it and quickly spotted a gap — that while its videos were mostly fun and lighthearted, no one seemed to be covering news there. “I thought that’s a hole I could fill,” she said in an interview with Forbes. Her very first video, on the travel ban implemented during the first Trump presidency, racked up 60,000 views — a figure that left her gobsmacked.

That early validation convinced her to double down. Today, Remillard is known to her audience as “The News Girl” and has nearly 4 million followers on TikTok alone.

From the anchor desk to delivering the news on TikTok

Recent news explainer TikToks she’s posted — on topics including the White House joining TikTok, the Trump tariffs, and congressional debate over lawmakers trading stocks — have all racked up more than 1 million plays. “Some of the stuff I put on TikTok that gets millions of views, I probably would have never even covered on broadcast,” Remillard says. “Because my news director or assignment editor would have said this is so boring! We’re not doing a story about the debt ceiling! It’s so boring! But those videos get millions of views.

“The fundamentals are: People, viewers, desperately want to understand what’s going on, and legacy media is not talking to them in a way that appeals to them. The way that legacy media talks to them alienates them, and I am stepping into that void.”

The transition from broadcast journalist to TikTok personality, she told me, was less about changing her journalism than adapting its form. “The fundamentals are the same—my reporting, sourcing, ethics. All of that is the same as it’s been for 23, 24 years for me. It’s just the package of it, the way I tell the story, the structure of it is now very different.” What wouldn’t make the cut in a traditional newsroom sometimes becomes her most popular content on TikTok. “I laugh sometimes, because the videos that get millions of views involve things like the debt ceiling or the (U.S. Senate’s) Byrd Rule.”

She works alone, producing the equivalent of two to three broadcast-style packages every day. That includes researching, reporting, filming, and editing, among other daily tasks. Her focus is also tightly defined: Federal government stories that affect basically everyone — that means Congress, the Supreme Court, and the White House are all fair game. And, unlike many TikTok creators, Remillard draws a hard line between journalism and the influencer economy. She told me, in fact, that the term influencer makes her cringe and that she regards herself — and wants others to regard her — as a journalist, full stop.

That commitment means, while many creators rely on sponsorships, she refuses to promote products. “I would never sit on an anchor desk and tell viewers to buy a vacuum, then pivot back into city council coverage. Why would I do it here?”

Instead, she leans on things like platform creator funds and subscription revenue. It hasn’t been easy — she went two years without making money — but she believes it’s the only way to preserve trust with her audience. “The money I make comes from my viewers,” she said. “That tells me they trust me, and they want me to continue to do this work. And that’s something I take a lot of pride in.”

Consuming news on TikTok, and a journalism shift

Her career trajectory is part of a broader realignment in how journalists deliver news — and their audiences consume that content.

Half of all U.S. adults on TikTok, for example, now say they regularly get news on the platform, according to a 2024 survey. TikTok itself has started hiring managers specifically to support news creators, while Remillard herself is part of a growing coterie of journalists who’ve gone independent — either by choice or involuntarily because of a layoff. Substack and similar platforms have become a refuge for journalists like Jim Acosta, Mehdi Hasan, and other journo-preneurs proving that new ventures can thrive outside of the mainstream ecosystem.

On TikTok, Remillard’s audience doesn’t just watch passively. They comment, ask questions, and check in on her if she misses a day. She also gets feedback from classrooms. She’s heard from students who’ve told her that her videos help with classes like social studies, while teachers have written to say they play her explainers in class. Even a lo-fi element — the wooden spoon she uses in videos in lieu of a pointer — has become a fan favorite. “It’s quirky, it’s weird, but it works,” she said.

For all the growth she’s seen on TikTok, Remillard is quick to point out that the freedom comes with trade-offs. She no longer answers to a news director, but she also no longer has the safety net of a newsroom around her. “I have my own schedule and can do this whenever I want,” she says. “But the downside is I’m doing this for longer every single day of the week. And on top of that, I don’t get a guaranteed paycheck every two weeks.”

In other words, even as journalism continues to evolve, the job hasn’t gotten any easier. The tools and platforms may change, but the heart of the job is the same as ever: Making sense of a complicated world. For Remillard, that’s what makes the long hours of being an independent journalist worth it.