Longtime journalist Lisa Remillard stands in front of her phone, presses record and starts reporting on a government shutdown most likely to happen days before Christmas. But she’s not reporting live at a news desk —she’s in the comfort of her own living room, wearing a colorful sweater and jeans as her bright Christmas tree sparkles behind her.
“I guess I’ll start with the facts, as I always do,” says Remillard, 45, before diving into the news report shared to her 3.2 million followers on TikTok. She spent years working as a local news anchor before deciding to leave the industry in 2018. Then during the pandemic, Remillard came up with an idea to report national news on TikTok — which she says no one was doing at the time — and she’s never looked back.
Remillard is among the trend of people serving as news sources online to a growing number of young people following them. According to a recent report by the Pew Research Center, one in five people ages 18 to 29 get their general news from “news influencers” — individuals with at least 100,000 followers on social media who regularly post about news. Younger users are more likely than older users to see breaking news as it happens across Facebook, X, Instagram and TikTok, Pew’s data finds.
A potential ban on TikTok, which could come as soon as Jan. 19, could impact the work of news influencers, although many — including Remillard — post to a variety of social media platforms. The vast majority of news influencers (85%) studied by Pew have an account on X, while half are on Instagram, and a slightly smaller share (44%) are on YouTube. Roughly 3-in-10 are on TikTok.
While Remillard is a journalist, other women who share information – and often opinion – don’t appear to have a connection or background with a news organization. Some popular women who share their own political commentary include left-leaning Kate Leone, a fiction writer who goes by The Girl With A Microphone, and conservative female-duo “Chicks On The Right,” who have over 1.4 million followers on Facebook. There are also influencers who cover specific topics, like Kyla Scanlon, author of “In This Economy?,” who grew in popularity on TikTok by regularly sharing business and finance news. Her financial expertise — paired with an informal nature that Gen Z viewers can relate to — has helped her garner a following of more than 217,000 people.
“Hey everyone, Fed Chair Jerome Powell here,” Scanlon says in her TikTok video before climbing the couch and pretending to lose her footing. “As you can see, the Federal Reserve is in a balancing act.”
Addressing the Financial Drawbacks and Gaps
While there are many “fabulous female journalists,” there are few who report the news frequently on social media, says Remillard, who distances herself from the term “influencer” since she has professional news experience. One reason stems from the fact that many women are still figuring out ways to capitalize off the various platforms, she says. A report by the influencer marketing services and technology company Izea revealed that in 2021 male influencers made an average of 30% more money per post than female influencers.
Remillard says she, too, has struggled making money off social media, especially since she doesn’t do sponsorships, which range between $100 to $200,000 per campaign depending on a user’s following count, according to Billo, a user-generated content platform based in the U.S. As a possible solution, Remillard says she recently started a Substack, a service that allows writers, journalists and other content creators to generate income through charging subscription fees.
“Nobody gets into journalism to be rich,” she says. “They’re making a living, and it’s hard to walk away from that [their official news job] and take a gamble on something that doesn’t make any…money.”
Sexism is another potential factor behind the lack of women news influencers — with Pew’s research finding that women make up just 30% of them, while men make up 63% (the rest either are nonbinary or their gender could not be determined by researchers). Brooklyne Gipson, an assistant professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, says many male influencers tend to have more reach despite having less credentials. She compares the popularity of “The Breakfast Club” host Charlamagne tha God to women news influencers like MSNBC’s Joy Reid and SiriusXM’s Reecie Colbert, whose popularity is not as large as Charlamagne’s, who has 4.5 million followers on his Instagram account.
“Charlamagne has more of an impact because he’s on a radio station, because he’s a man, and he’s seen as more credible off the top,” Gipson says. “Is he more credible than Joy Ann Reid or even Reecie Colbert? No, but he has that reach because he got the people through something else.” The Breakfast Club co-host, whose focus is music and entertainment, has shown more of a political presence in recent years, visible in his debate this past October with CNN’s Anderson Cooper about the media’s coverage of Donald Trump. Most people don’t have the time to sit, understand and vet political views and information, Gipson adds, so they rely on parasocial relationships from individuals they trust on a certain topic.
Brooke Erin Duffy, an associate professor of communication at Cornell University who is currently teaching a gender and media class, attests to how sexism can impact women influencers and their followers. One example she cites is when X, formerly Twitter, announced in October that it would allow users to see the posts of those who blocked them. “You can imagine the fear of people who have used the block feature as a safety mechanism against criticism, negativity, hate, harassment [and] toxins,” she says. “X has been seen as a much less safe place for women and minoritized communities.”
The Future for Women Online
Experts agree that there is an overall lack of trust in media organizations among young people. One of the biggest hallmarks in the new generation of influencers, Duffy says, is that many are coming from outside journalism, which can be beneficial, “because it enables more diverse voices to flourish.” But since these news influencers aren’t tied to an organization, “they’re less bound to the convention standards and ideals of the profession,” she adds. In fact, a recent study published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization revealed that 62% of content creators who were surveyed didn’t vet how accurate information was before sharing it with others.
Regarding the future of online sources for news, Duffy says any existing platform, like woman-led Bluesky, can emerge. She also believes that social platform companies need to provide better mechanisms of protection for women overall.
As for Remillard, she fully believes reporting news on social media is the way forward, since local and cable news networks are struggling. While social media has shifted the landscape of how people receive news, the downside is siloed information that puts people in echo chambers, she says, which is “the other piece that needs to get figured out.” Until then, she says she wants to pave the way for other professional women journalists to share news on TikTok.
“I take a lot of responsibility in trying to find the way to make this work so more journalists would feel comfortable and safe to do this too — because I think more journalism is always going to be better.” ◼️
