Lisa Remillard
Social Media Journalist
Filing news reports for the TikTok crowd
Lisa Remillard is a career broadcast journalist turned TikTok journalist. She grew up in California and has a degree in broadcast journalism and a master’s degree in strategic public relations from the University of Southern California.
Her journalism journey has taken her from Tallahassee and Tampa in Florida to Las Vegas and San Diego, where she anchored “Good Morning, San Diego” on local station KUSI-TV.
After 15 years reporting and anchoring television news shows across the country, she cofounded her own digital network, BEONDTV (which includes her current show, “Carlos & Lisa”). Now, an at-home desk and smartphone setup are all she needs to turn her social media platform into broadcast news.
By Tiffany Chang
When I was 4 years old, I told my mom that I wanted to be a TV reporter. I always had a drive to be first. I always wanted to do something different.
Because of the way I look, people pigeonhole me a lot, so I always feel compelled to do something different. Then people realize, “Oh, she’s more than just all that blonde hair.”
My first job in television was in 2003 as a reporter. I was what we used to call a “one-man band,” carrying my own weight in equipment in heels around the Florida capital of Tallahassee.
In February 2020, I had a TikTok influencer come on my show. I thought TikTok was a joke. When he told me I should go on TikTok, I responded, “I am way too old.” But he had 8 million followers, and I thought, “Okay, that’s something.”
I got on the app. I posted nothing, just watched for three weeks. And I saw at the time that no one was doing news. No one.
Nobody was doing news the way I knew how to, and nobody was going to be able to turn around the types of stories that I knew I could do in this format. Creating and telling a story in a minute and 15 seconds is what I’m used to. I could make it in 60 seconds!
It was a huge gaping hole that I knew I could fill — and I did.
I posted my first news video for TikTok on March 12, 2020, and it ended up getting 60,000 views. Since then, I have been posting at least once a day, every day. I shoot all my videos on my iPhone. I have a ring light, a key light, and my little wireless microphone that I love and carry with me everywhere. That’s it.
Keeping Emotions Out of the News
I would not be able to do what I do today, and be as successful as I am without having the base I learned in local news. I don’t have the luxury of being wrong — ever. I always have to be right. I always have to be perfect. It’s my content, my words. The things that people are coming to me for, I have to be right on. I would never have known how to be right, how to be as researched, and how to be as confident in what I’m presenting, if not for what I learned in local news.
I’m working just as hard now as I did when I anchored a five-hour morning show. I go through the exact same process: read five newspapers a day, watch all the news stations, check every website, and pick out the big stories of the day.
That’s probably the most controversial part of my TikTok page. I want to cover all the things, but I also have to be realistic about my process and what it takes to put one video out. My rule of thumb is that I cover only national-headline news. I don’t cover state news, I don’t cover local news, and I don’t cover individual cases.
The East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment is a national story but I didn’t cover it because it’s a state issue. Gabby Petito going missing was a national story, but I didn’t cover that because it’s a story about an individual.
I get pushback on that choice every day, but I am one person, and with all of the things I do, I still have to be able to go to the bathroom during the day! I have to be really stringent about what I cover and what I don’t.
I do get interpreted by TikTok commenters as cold-hearted, standoffish, or mean because I don’t show outrage, I don’t show sadness. Emotions are influential, which is not part of the job of a journalist. My job is to show facts — it’s up to the viewer to decide what to do with them.
If I’ve learned anything in this experiment with social media, it’s that journalists have done a crappy job explaining what we do and what we don’t do. The big cable news organizations are not helping us; they’re making it worse by conflating these different modalities on television and not clearly separating that this person is a journalist, this person is a commentator, this person is an analyst.
Commentators and analysts share their opinions; journalists tell you the facts
Broadcasters Should Embrace Social Media
There’s this photo of me when I was young, just a toddler. I’m looking at the television and I have a pretend microphone. And then when I was 4, I told my mom I wanted to be on TV.
Literally, my entire life revolves around doing that. I started from high school, working in the field, talking to people, studying it, doing internships. People thought I was gonna quit just because back then it was hard for young women to be like, “I’m gonna leave my life and everybody behind and move to another state by myself.” But I did.
Now what I’m doing is the future of journalism.
Newsrooms are bleeding money and in the long run, under this model, they’re aren’t going to survive. Viewers will always want local news, but appointment news slots, like the morning, noon, 3, 6, and 11 p.m. are a thing of the past. People watch news constantly online. But for some reason, broadcasters can’t see that people don’t consume information that way anymore.
If a new platform came up tomorrow, I would replicate my exact same model. Social media has a lifespan, each platform has a lifespan. TikTok’s not going to be the cool thing forever. So you have to remain innovative, you have to be on the ball. You have to have the vision plus the experience to be able to see what’s coming and recognize, “I need to jump on this bandwagon right now.”