The freshman on the Capitol Hill beat

This issue is sponsored by Pew Research Center

In the fall of 2025, Anthony Pellegrino was a high school senior from Chicago, wondering how to bolster his application to George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs. A budding hockey reporter, Pellegrino decided to launch a TikTok channel about politics. He spent months in his bedroom putting in the reps to get comfortable on camera and sharing the latest political news. Five months into his experiment things were looking up: he had 80,000 followers.

Now, less than a year later – just a month into his freshman year at GW – 18-year-old Pellegrino regularly finds himself jumping on a Lime scooter in suit and tie after class, headed to Capitol Hill to shoot video he’ll share with the now 103,000 strong followers of his TikTok account, where he describes himself as a “Congressional Reporter in D.C.”

Anthony doesn’t have a standing press credential. He doesn’t seem to need one. He knows where to find members of Congress, and he knows how to get them talking. He’s part of a generation of budding reporters who grew up on these platforms. They know how to build an audience, how to reach their peers and how to dodge the “cringe” label that sticks to so many legacy brands when they venture onto social platforms.

Globally, more than half (52%) of 18–24-year-olds now say social media, video networks and AI chatbots are their main way of getting news, 32 points ahead of the next most popular main source, according to the Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report. In the U.S., the pull is even stronger around the midterms. Among Gen Z adults (ages 18 to 29), 77% get information about the 2026 election from online creators, compared with 64% of all U.S. adults, according to a new survey the creator-news app SaySo commissioned from YouGov.

If an 18-year-old can build 100K+ followers from his bedroom before setting foot in D.C., what does that tell us about what Gen Z wants from the news, and what does it take to turn that into a beat on Capitol Hill? Last week I sat down with Anthony and asked him exactly that.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Liz: You started your TikTok account last November, but after a slow start, one video changed everything. What happened?

Anthony: I'd look at my account and there was not one defining video – nothing saying who I am and what I’m doing. So I made a video, and I remember the script to this day. The last line was, "My job is not to tell you what to believe, just to tell you what happened." For a week I sat with that script, and it was a 15-second video. I just had a gut feeling that I wanted this video to be pinned on my profile.

I posted it in mid-February. Slowly it started becoming my best video. The amount of people that were watching it almost all the way through just blew my mind, because normally in videos you're hoping for more than 5 seconds. When you cross that 10-second line, the algorithm will push it and push it. I had gone from a few thousand followers to 80,000 going into April.

All it takes is one video, one right line, to bring you into places you never could even imagine. But it takes reps. I was probably 30 to 40 videos deep, which I look back now and I laugh about, and they're in the private section of my TikTok account.

Liz: You'd built most of that audience before you ever set foot in D.C. How has your work changed now that you can actually get to Capitol Hill?

Anthony: I had just hit 100K before I arrived in D.C., and since then I've seen a much steadier growth, based on every video, not just a single video driving audience growth. Now I'm not as much relaying information or news with an unbiased lens as much as I am creating news with an unbiased lens.

I try to have three or four questions a day. I want to be able to ask the question the same way to a Republican and the same way to a Democrat. You give them the mic. With my posting strategy, it's asking one side, and the next video I hope to be [talking to] the other side. The last thing I want is someone to go on my page and see a video and they're like, “I thought this guy was unbiased.”

Liz: What do audiences get from your coverage that they can't get from the legacy reporters on the Hill?

Anthony: Authenticity is the first thing that comes to my mind. Legacy media has been in our nation since our founding, from the newspaper to television, and I tip my hat to them. Without legacy media, the last 250 years would look quite different. At the same time, young people are very wary and cautious about who they trust in the media and politics right now, and that goes for both sides of the aisle.

I don't have anything or anyone behind me. It's just me. When I'm in my dorm prepping the questions I'm going to ask, I'm looking at it from the general American public's concerns, not what is assigned to you or what an institution wants for that day.

If you're with legacy media, you're in a designated area in the Capitol, and members of Congress will stop in that area to talk to you when they come and go from votes. We independent reporters have more of an opportunity to be in other areas that aren't just the press stakeout, and you get windows you wouldn't get otherwise. I try to take those windows, especially off camera. I make small talk with them and ask them about their lives. There was a member of Congress who had a close call with a little propeller plane about a month ago, and you just go, “Hey, how are you feeling? That seemed very intense.” Over time they reciprocate with your trust, your respect and your authenticity.

Liz: You don't have a standing press credential. Do you want one, or would it limit you?

Anthony: An outlet has offered me a hybrid reporting assignment in Washington in a correspondent role, and one of the big key factors I’m weighing is if I’m credentialed with this outlet, would I still be able to roam the halls.

Liz: How do the legacy reporters on the Hill react to you?

Anthony: I've talked to, I would say, four other reporters on the Hill who are independent, and they say there are outlets that are frustrated with us because we’re forming some credibility in Congress and around D.C. That’s a shame. I think it's a matter of how legacy media and independent reporters should work together to get to the point where everyone has their coverage, and audiences choose for themselves who they trust.

Liz: You said earlier that young audiences want an unbiased source of news. Some research on why creators are making such huge gains with audiences says it's often the opposite: many creators have a point of view, but the bias is transparent, while legacy media keeps insisting it's impartial and trust keeps falling. So do Gen Z consumers want unbiased news?

Anthony: What I'd say about Gen Z is unbiased is great, but even more so, transparency. If you are a liberal or a conservative, you want to know in this digital age where the agenda is. At the same time, there are plenty of young people, especially at my school, that will tell me privately, “We need unbiased news, we need news without an agenda.”

Being unbiased is not really a linear thing. I have my own standards, whether that's asking the same question to Republicans and Democrats, or spending the same amount of time [with each party] in the Senate. Little things that I try and add up over time. I can say I'm unbiased, but my biggest hope is that my audience sees with time that I can back that up with the way I cover Congress.

Liz: You're a freshman, and you're already doing the job. What do you still have to learn?

Anthony: I have a month of experience [in D.C. and at GW] under my belt. A lot of these professors here have decades of experience in the field, and you can't always learn those lessons on your own. I know I can't. Reporting on Congress, you become self-taught in a lot of things. I don't look at it like school is here to teach me how to be a journalist. To me it's, how do I learn from the experiences of former and current journalists who are now professors, and apply that to the journalism I'm already practicing? There are things that I have to learn. I am not experienced in news writing, per se. They say iron sharpens iron, right? I hope the iron of SMPA sharpens the iron at the Hill and vice versa.

Liz: What's your advice for students thinking about starting something like this?

Anthony: Four words: do not be afraid. At the end of the day, we all have a phone. We all can take out our phone and record. You can literally be anywhere. I was in my bedroom for basically half a year, learning and experimenting. You don't have to know exactly what you want to do. You don't have to know where you want to end up. When I came to D.C., I didn't know what I was going to cover. Three days in, I was covering the IndyCar race in town because I thought, “What else am I going to do?” And then on September 2nd, I headed to the Capitol to cover the House in session and that was it for me. It's crazy to me how fast things have changed. Pick up your phone and start.

I should note that Anthony’s goal, at least as of this writing, is to transcend TikTok to land a national on-camera correspondent job in Washington, with national news anchor role as the long-term plan.

Full Disclosure: I’m a fellow at George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs, where Anthony is a student, and will be teaching the school’s first class in Entrepreneurial Journalism in the spring.

How this newsletter is made: A human (hi, it's Liz 👋) writes, edits and makes every editorial call here. I use Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant, as a research tool — each week it sweeps my sources and assembles the first draft of the links roundup. Every link and every word gets a human read before it reaches you.