A video about the Senate's “Big Beautiful Bill” shouldn't get nearly 10 million views. But for Lisa Remillard, it did, and she'll tell you exactly why.

“I read the bill,” she said. “The actual bill. Not what Fox News said about the bill, not what NBC said about the bill. I read the bill.”

That's it. That's her edge.

Remillard, also known online as The News Girl, is not your typical social media success story. She didn't blow up dancing on TikTok or building a personal brand around hot takes. She built a following of more than 4 million on TikTok by doing something that most newsrooms have been quietly walking away from: actual journalism. The kind with sourcing, ethics and a reverence for facts that borders on stubborn.

And she's doing it entirely by herself, on her phone, in a studio she built.

Remillard has wanted to be a reporter since she was three years old. She spent 15 years anchoring and reporting local news across the country before making a move that most of her colleagues probably thought was career suicide. She left in 2018, co-founded an OTT lifestyle platform called BEONDTV, and found herself at a crossroads.

Then a young TikToker with millions of followers appeared on her show. He told her she should be on TikTok. Her response?

“Absolutely not. I am way too young. It's a bunch of kids dancing.”

That was 2019. Clearly, she caved.

By 2020, Remillard posted her first news video on the platform. It got 60,000 views. For someone who had spent a decade anchoring morning television, where 60,000 viewers would have been a solid number, the reaction was immediate and visceral.

“I lost it. I had never seen a number like that... nothing at any station I had ever been at had I ever seen a number like that.”

She went all in, and she hasn't looked back.

What she saw in 2020 wasn't just an opportunity. It was a gap. Twitter was text. Instagram was still images. TikTok put everything she was good at together: short-form, on-camera reporting, and nobody else was doing news on it yet.

“I saw that nobody else was doing news at the time," she said. "And so I was like, well, that's my lane.”

Here's what separates Remillard from the thousands of other people talking about news online: she covers the wonky, complicated, sleep-inducing machinery of the federal government and she makes it land.

The debt ceiling. Reconciliation bills. Senate procedures. Budget rescissions. Congressional hearings. She watches them. She reads the actual legislation. She follows whatever the president, Treasury Department, or IRS puts out: primary sources, not secondary coverage.

When a video about the Senate's Byrd Rule, a procedural mechanism most Americans have never heard of, racked up 500,000 views, it didn't surprise her.

"I started it with, 'the byrd bath is byrd bathing,'" she said, laughing. "And everybody's like, I get it. Like, yes, we're in."

That's the formula in action: the structure and rigor of old-school journalism, delivered in the language of the platform she's on. She uses TikTok slang not because she's pandering, but because she's fluent. When you're talking to people where they already are, you speak their language.

"I'm like bringing the old school into the modern era," she said.

If you spend five minutes on Remillard's page, one thing becomes obvious fast: she never tells you what to think.

No political affiliation. No outrage loops. No hot takes engineered for shares. She reports. Full stop.

That distinction between journalist and news influencer is something Remillard feels strongly enough about to build her entire brand around.

"The term news influencer, for me, it grates on my soul," she said. “Journalists aren't meant to be influencers. Journalists are meant to be the ones who report the facts to the audience. So then the audience gets to make their own decision about what to do with those facts.”

She's not just talking about herself. She gave a TED talk about whether ordinary viewers can even tell the difference between a journalist and a news influencer when they're scrolling, and her answer was blunt.

“Generally, people who are busy with their own lives scrolling like this can initially not tell the difference.”

Her diagnosis of how we got here is pointed: cable news networks started putting journalists, commentators and analysts on the same screen without distinguishing between them. The audience got confused, and nobody thought to explain the difference.

"Journalists are the worst public relations people,” she said. “We are horrible at our own public relations. We are not good at telling our own story.”

Her answer isn't to blur the lines further. It's to hold them harder, working with organizations trying to carve out a formal lane for journalists doing real reporting on social media.

"I fundamentally believe that as journalists, we are there to present to the audience what is happening and to present it in a way that they can understand.”

Her audience responds to that. Commenters regularly tell her: Why can't the real news be more like you?

"Well, technically, I am the real news," she said. "But I get the point."

There's no team behind The News Girl. No producer, no editor, no camera operator. Remillard writes, researches, sources, shoots, edits, posts and responds to comments. All by herself, every day.

"I have a fancy camera. I'm supposed to be using a fancy camera, but I use my phone every day."

She left local news thinking she'd finally have some breathing room. Instead, she works seven days a week, fifteen hours a day.

“I sleep thinking about ways I'm going to report a story. I sleep thinking about what's coming tomorrow,” she said.

Her videos are almost entirely her, talking directly into the lens. Minimal B-roll. Heavy on graphics and text. She's deliberate about captioning because she knows a chunk of her audience is watching on silent, scrolling through the subway or sneaking a peek at work. She treats captions like headlines: they tell you what you're getting before you've committed to watching. Every chart and graphic you see is one she built herself, from primary source data she gathered on her own.

And she never saves the best for last. Her lead, the hook and most important piece of the story go first. Always.

One piece of advice Remillard gives consistently, to aspiring journalists and the clients she coaches on the side: find your niche.

“The internet is too big," she said. “You need to find a portion of the internet that you can attack, that you can dominate. And then once you start to get into that lane, you're gonna start to hear feedback from people.”

It's not that you can't cover everything, she's quick to clarify. It's that there aren't enough hours in the day, and casting too wide a net when you're starting out means reaching no one.

But there's a bigger mistake she sees, one that trips up experienced journalists as much as new ones: thinking you have to share your opinions to succeed online.

“I am proof that you can be successful and not share opinions,” she said. “And that is the biggest mistake I see. Not just for young journalists, but also legacy journalists who come out of that space.”

Here's what doesn't come up in most conversations about building a following online: the money. Or rather, the lack of it.

Remillard doesn't take corporate sponsorships, a deliberate choice rooted in the same principles that drove her journalism in the first place. The line between advertising and editorial is one she won't let social media erase.

“There is money to be made on the far left, and there's money to be made on the far right. But at this point, there's no money to make in the middle,” she said.

She makes what she makes through platform revenue and her Substack, Facts HQ, where paid subscribers support her work directly. Every night, alongside the day's reporting, she posts the primary source documents, the actual bills, the actual data, so her audience can check her work.

"100% of the time, they're gonna see that I'm right."

Her longer-term mission is to figure out a financial model that makes independent journalism on social media actually viable. One idea she's been developing: work with platforms to attach advertising to journalistic content the same way television does, with the journalist getting a direct cut of the ad revenue.

“Why are there not more journalists like you on our platform?” she says, platforms always ask her. “And the answer is because there's no money in it.”

Remillard is clear-eyed about the stakes. This isn't just a personal career move. She sees herself as responsible for helping usher in the next generation of journalists who want to do real reporting in digital spaces.

"Without us doing this job, this country is going to be in a really bad place," she said. "It's so much easier to be an influencer and talk about the news and your opinion about the news. That's where all the money is."

She recently published a formal ethics policy she's lived by, but never spelled out publicly until now. Everything she reports can be traced to a document, a statistic or a primary source. She's never put out something she's had to retract. Not once, in 800-plus videos.

"I have never... never once has there been anything in any of my videos that I've gone back and been like, oh, I shouldn't have put that out. Never once, and that's on purpose."

People are hungry for that, she says. Not sensation. Not spin. Just someone they can actually trust.

“People are desperate to find people that they can trust to give them the information that they are looking for.”

Oxford's Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism reported in 2025 that social media has overtaken television as the number one place Americans get their news. That's not a coming shift. It already happened.

The question now is who fills that space.

Remillard's bet, borne out by her proof of concept, is that audiences aren't actually tired of serious journalism. They're tired of journalism that feels disconnected or agenda-driven. Give them the real thing, in a format they can digest, from someone they trust, and they'll watch a video about Senate procedure.

In an era where the feed is everything, Lisa Remillard figured out how to make old-school journalism feel new again. Not by changing what journalism is, but by refusing to let social media change it for her.

Thanks so much for reading News Disrupted! If you’re into honest conversations about where news is headed, the best way to support is by subscribing and telling your friends about the project. And if you have thoughts or ideas, I’m all ears. Just hit reply to this email.