Watching a Newsgirls video feels a little like being on FaceTime with a friend—one who’s great at doing winged eyeliner and speaking about Taylor Swift’s musical catalog or the last season of The Bachelor, but who’s also the type to fill you in on the latest global gossip. With grabby headers like “Trump Is Replacing the WH Press Room With a Swimming Pool?!” and “Hegseth’s Wife Spies on His Drinking & Women,” the founders behind Newsgirls hope to stop you mid-scroll for an easily digestible dive into the day’s most mind-boggling news stories.
“When we were launching Newsgirls, we were like, We have to start with a banger, really show people this is a cool thing,” says Wren Woodson, one of the two 30-year-old journalists behind the budding social media news empire. “We delusionally wrote these emails. We wrote [to] Bill Clinton…and we were like, ‘Hi, Mr. President.’”
“No,” her cohost, Mabel Kabani, interjects, “we didn’t say that. We actually said, ‘Hi, Bill.’ The worst thing ever.”
“So bad,” Kabani adds with a good-natured eye roll.
It’s easier to laugh off their naivete now that Newsgirls, their online news start-up aimed at Gen Z, has found an audience of nearly half a million followers across Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. After bonding as the youngest hires at 60 Minutes—which marked each woman’s first gig out of college—Kabani and Woodson launched Newsgirls in 2024 “to talk to people our age…[who] are just not watching traditional outlets anymore,” Woodson tells Vanity Fair. “We think of ourselves as journalists, but creators too, doing credible investigative work.” They identify with the term “news creator,” says Kabani. “But we really like to go out of our way to tell everyone we’re journalists—because we’re doing the work as journalists. There are so many news creators out in the world that aren’t doing that work.”
