Despite sexist attacks, these female journalists have built massive online audiences on their own. Here’s how

Journalism is more precarious than ever. That’s why some young reporters are shunning news organisations and going solo with the help of newsletters, podcasts and other news formats. 

The rise of vertical video has intensified this trend. This year’s Digital News Report suggests that a range of independent voices dominate conversations around the news on platforms such as YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, with mainstream media falling behind. 

As part of the report, survey respondents in five countries were asked to state where they paid attention to news (mainstream media or alternative sources) and to name the mainstream and alternative accounts they followed more closely. Shockingly but perhaps unsurprisingly, only one of the 35 most mentioned individual accounts across those five markets is a woman: French journalist Salomé Saqué. 

Why don’t audiences gravitate towards female news content creators? To answer this question and to look at what it is like to be a woman news influencer today, I spoke with three women from France, Argentina and Canada who have managed to get thousands of followers, millions of views, and their fair share of challenges and criticism. They speak about their work and the challenges they face when reporting the news online. 

Three journalists going solo

Rachel Gilmore was one of the first reporters in Canada to embrace social vertical video by pitching TikTok video explainers to her former employer Global News in 2021. 

“I just thought it would be a fun, cool, fulfilling thing to do and then [Global News] actually ended up pausing it as part of what they called a rebrand,” she says. “I had worked so hard on it and with so few resources… It just kind of felt like a bit of a kick in the pants and I wasn't even a part of the discussion.”

After this decision and a round of layoffs in 2023, Gilmore decided to dip her toes into doing the same kind of explainers independently. Today she has more than 70,000 followers on TikTok and 24,000 followers on Instagram. 

@rachel_gilmore

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♬ original sound - Rachel Gilmore

Similarly, Tiffany del Mastro started her career in journalism working for Clarín, one of the most read outlets in her native Argentina, where she posted on the newspaper’s social media accounts. In parallel, Del Mastro started to build her own audience. Four years later, she decided to leave and focus entirely on her own work. 

“I used to work eight hours a day for the newspaper. So I said: ‘Hey, I am going to dedicate those eight hours to myself and to my work because I saw the potential',” she says. ”I learned a lot at Clarín in terms of how to approach the news.” Del Mastro now has over 136,000 followers on Instagram and 121,000 followers on TikTok. 

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Tiffy Del Mastro ® • Periodista independiente (@tiffydelmastro)

French journalist Salomé Saqué, the only woman mentioned by survey respondents in our chapter on news content creators, also arrived at journalism through a very traditional path: studying journalism at La Sorbonne and then working for public broadcaster France 24. 

Saqué’s Eureka moment came with the yellow vests protests in France. “I was at the desk inside our office and I would write and talk about the news on air,” she says. “Then the yellow vest movement happened and I really wanted to be more on the ground but the channel wouldn't let me, so I started working for another TV channel as a fixer. I also started doing my own videos, showing the lives of the protestors, showing what they had gone through… These videos went viral, and I realised that I had more visibility on the Internet than I had on the TV channel I was working for.”

Saqué is now a prominent journalist in France, where she balances working for both traditional media outlets and her own channels. She boasts 355,000 followers on Instagram, 55,000 on TikTok, and she was recently named the second most-followed woman on LinkedIn in France. 

These creators fund their journalism through several revenue streams. Del Mastro partners with brands and employs a crowdfunding model, but in the future she would like to offer courses and online consulting on digital presence, content creation and personal branding. Saqué collaborates with several mainstream media outlets as a columnist. Gilmore is the only one who has a journalism-related day job that pays the bills. 

Why audiences turn to news influencers

All three journalists I spoke to started their careers working for traditional media outlets. These outlets failed to see their potential and didn’t give them support and freedom to experiment. 

Peppered in Del Mastro’s videos about the war in Ukraine, the situation in Venezuela and politics in Argentina, are videos about her travels to Japan, her personal growth, and pictures of her 26th birthday. She says that one of the reasons she thinks people gravitate towards news influencers like her is because they see her as more of a person than an entity. 

Similarly, Gilmore thinks her audience appreciates a more intimate method of news delivery. She compares her videos with explaining something over FaceTime to a friend as opposed to the often unnatural intonations of a newscaster sitting behind a desk. 

“It's a more personal medium, but that also demands a bit more of a personal touch in the videos too,” she says. “That’s how people want to consume content on those platforms: they want to feel as though they know who the message is coming from. I just try to be transparent. Sometimes I’ll crack a joke here and there and it’s not something that you necessarily would encounter in traditional news delivery.”

Our research suggests that audiences are interested in seeing different perspectives from what they traditionally see from mainstream media. This is one of the comments that Del Mastro and the other journalists have gotten the most: that they often cover topics not widely covered by mainstream media outlets. 

“People wrote to me saying that they find the news I share interesting because they are not reported by the news media,” she says. “It’s a huge responsibility because some people tell me, 'I only get my news from you.’”

This is a feeling shared by the other creators I spoke to. All of them take ethics and rigour seriously, but their approach may be different from the one of traditional media outlets. 

“I’ve always said that there is no such thing as objectivity,” says Saqué. “We are always carrying values: from the choice of a topic to a title, the people we interview, the words we use… We are carrying with us a point of view. I am honest and professional: I check my facts and I use the methodology of a journalist. But I am not objective, and I am very honest about my views on the world and especially about the values I stand for.”

Where are the women?

What explains the lack of women amongst the most mentioned news influencers? The three women I spoke to had different responses to this question. 

Del Mastro points out that most of the personalities mentioned in Argentina are also prominent personalities in traditional media, a universe still very much male-dominated in her native country. “There is a disproportionate number of men in positions of power,” she says. “Things are beginning to change a bit, with outlets creating gender desks to ensure better coverage.”

Gilmore has two theories that could explain the disparity in the report: the first one is societal and the second one is algorithmic. “There’s the basic reality of misogyny where white straight men are kind of the default. So, in this incredibly personal and up-close medium, perhaps they are seen as more objective,” she says. “I do also wonder if some of it is algorithmic, like women’s bodies are often seen as more sexual, and that can then lead to you being down-ranked by the algorithm.”

Social media platforms’ algorithms are somewhat a trade secret. However, research from the University of Kent suggests that TikTok amplifies misogynistic content. 

The platform itself used to instruct “moderators to suppress posts created by users deemed too ugly, poor, or disabled for the platform”, according to documents obtained by The Intercept in 2020. Moreover, while there is no official list of words or tags that get flagged on TikTok, creators have reported that phrases like “black lives matter”, “asian women” or “intersex” have been non-discoverable in the app.

Saqué, who was the only female news influencer mentioned in our survey, stresses that there are more men than women in this space. This imbalance, she thinks, boils down to the harassment that women suffer on the Internet. 

“I don’t often say it’s because of misogyny,” she says. “I don’t often even dare to talk about the fact that it's not the same for men, because people will always tell me that they have plenty of examples where men got harassed and it’s like I’m making it up. But there is a bias about women even starting to dare to do such things. This is another kind of harassment.”

An avalanche of attacks 

Gilmore’s history with online harassment started even before she became an independent content creator. At the time she worked as a journalist for Global News in Canada, her objectivity was questioned and her looks were being commented on. 

She was being called “a liberal shill or a government mouthpiece,” and she started getting threats. Today she still experiences this harassment online, where her videos have gotten mass reported and her family members have even gotten threatened online too. 

“It definitely impacts other women's interest in entering the space, which makes me sad, because I have had women say that to me: ‘I want to get into journalism. I want to get into reporting like this, but I’m afraid, because I see what you go through, and I just don’t think I could handle that,’” Gilmore says. “Not only does it impact people’s decision to enter journalism, but it can actually impact their ability to stay in journalism too.”

A 2022 global report by the International Center for Journalists gives more insight into how widespread harassment against female journalists actually is. Nearly three quarters survey respondents identifying as women said they had experienced online violence in the course of their work, with threats of physical and sexual violence reported by 25% and 18% of respondents respectively. 

Saqué describes three types of harassment she often gets. The first two have to do with misogynistic comments regarding her abilities as a journalist and comments about her appearance: from criticising the way she looks to sexualising her. The third type, while less common, is more insidious and dangerous. 

“The third type is serious threats. It’s less common than the rest, but it still happens quite a lot. For example, rape threats saying that I deserve to be raped,” she says. “They come in your private messages, mostly from anonymous accounts. This happened from the beginning [of my career]. It doesn’t happen every day. But even if it is just a message, it gets you. You have it in your mind afterwards.”

Saqué says this kind of harassment has only gotten worse in terms of frequency and violence when she became more visible and prominent in her home country. 

 

 

 

 

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“This has had a huge impact on me,” she says. “It's difficult for me to talk about it because then it seems like I am weak or I am not strong enough to do this job. So I mostly talk about the threats, and not about how much it hurts me. But it really did at some point, especially when I was younger. The worst part was not the threats, but the people attacking my skills, attacking my ability to do my job, and doing it massively.”

As she’s grown older, Saqué says she is better prepared to deal with the emotional toll of these attacks. She has also been able to connect with other women journalists on the internet, and this made her realise that it is not just her. 

“It's a huge obstacle to freedom of speech and to doing our job,” she says. “I know lots of people who don't want to talk about some subjects because the harassment is way too violent,” she says. 

Del Mastro has not experienced the same levels of harassment as Gilmore and Saqué. However, while working at Clarín, she used to get misogynistic comments from people in the audience who questioned her legitimacy in the business or asked her who she was dating to be representing such an important newspaper. “I still encourage women to get into this kind of work,” she says. 

Attacked by the far right

Despite hailing from different countries, far-right groups have targeted both Gilmore and Saqué. Unlike the regular harassment they receive everyday, they say, the presence of the far right opens up a different level of violence. 

“I’ve been harassed by people from every ideology,” says Saqué. “But nothing could compare to the far right in terms of aggressivity, threats, and numbers.” 

Saqué says these attacks are often more coordinated, with hoards of accounts suddenly accusing her of making a mistake or commenting on her looks. A far-right website published a list of individuals to kill (journalists, elected officials, lawyers). Her name was on that list, saying she deserved a bullet in her neck. Then came the wave of targeted harassment. 

“We went to the police and filed a complaint, but nothing happened,” she says. “I know it's not only about being a woman. But being a woman increases the intensity, the number of people and the type of harassment. Men don’t get many rape threats or comments about their boobs or how I look tired someday or if I put too much makeup. I don’t think men get to read these kinds of things.”

Gilmore, who frequently covers topics related to far-right extremism in Canada, has also received threats and harassment from far-right members which has bled offline. She recounts how two members of a far-right group recognised her from her TikTok videos on a street in Ottawa, took a picture of her, and posted it on a Telegram channel. 

“The post revealed exactly where I was and which street I was headed to,” says Gilmore, who alerted security and hid in a nearby mall.

“It's all been really surreal and exhausting,” she says. “I’m just doing this work because I want to help people. I don’t get paid for my TikToks. We don’t have a Creator Fund in Canada so I'm doing this because I genuinely just care about this stuff, and it’s a really hard price to pay so I understand why it spooks some people away from it.”

Despite the often gruelling nature of the job, the three journalists I spoke to are hoping that women are not discouraged from diving into this side of the industry. 

Saqué recommends other journalists to take time and space from social media if they need to. She herself decided to give up her 200,000 followers on X when the discourse became too toxic on the platform for her to stay there. 

“I feel like there are more and more young women doing [journalism online] and I hope they will stay on these platforms, but in terms of online harassment I hope they stay strong,” says Saqué. 

“I really think there is a future for women on these platforms,” she stresses. “I just want to tell them this. First, don't minimise the impact of what you read about yourself. When this happens to you, it’s important to acknowledge that it’s serious. It's okay to feel really bad about it and to get some help to deal with it.”