NEW ORLEANS — “@504_girl_” has built a huge audience on TikTok, who tune in for the unfiltered delivery… of New Orleans daily headlines.
“Reporting live from the trap, reporting live from Gotham City without Batman, reporting live from Grand Theft Auto New Orleans, reporting live from straight up hell. Let’s get into my top three news stories,” her videos usually begin.
Stacey Robertson’s intro gets straight to the point.
“Well you know Gotham City, right? People run amok, it’s crazy there, and without Batman,” she laughed during an interview at her home in New Orleans East. “So, we don’t have a superhero. Like, nobody’s coming to save us, nobody’s coming in to do the work to protect us.”
Her following has now grown to more than 200-thousand people from all over the world. Robertson said she’s been recognized in Texas, Florida, and all over New Orleans by those who have seen her videos.
“I am in total shock. I started off like I said during the pandemic talking, like most people, and for it to be where it is now and growing every day, I’m like, ‘Wow. This is something,’” she said.
And it became something fast. Robertson now earns money from occasional partnerships, plus views and merch sales.
The catalyst is her personality. Her most-watched video, with more than 900-thousand views, is a TikTok stitch about a gas delivery service in another city.
She laughs in her response to it, “Oh cuzzin, we have this service in New Orleans, and it’s called Fuel Up Nola. The only reason we have it is because we have a high number of carjackings.”
The videos she makes are facts sprinkled with comedy.
“All of it is trauma,” she said with a good-humored laugh. “All of this comedic stuff is in trauma.”
Robertson said she gets her typical content by subscribing to all the local news outlets’ push alerts. She combs through the daily articles, cross-checking facts from different outlets before taking notes.
Then, she makes her videos at her kitchen table, presenting the information in a way that sounds like you’re hearing it from family.
“I think it’s my interpretation of it that people really enjoy. It’s comedic. It’s truthful, but I say it in a comedic way,” she said.
“The news is stuffy, I’m sorry guys,” she laughed. “Like the news is stuffy, you guys sometimes use words that people can’t follow.”
Without a filter, she connects with an online audience that can be difficult to reach.
We asked, “Do you think that there are people that are just numb to all of these negative headlines?”
“Absolutely. I think by doing TikTok, I’ve been told that… you know, ‘I stopped watching the news but now I watch you.’ And I’m like, I don’t want you to just depend on what I’m giving you, right? So, you need to also look at the news to see what is going on.”
For Stacey, and a lot of native New Orleanians, what’s going on has become more difficult to stomach by the day.
There have been seemingly constant bullets and bloodshed, children both committing crimes and becoming the victims of them and carjackings and car thefts from West End to the furthest corners of the East.
Robertson believes some of these problems stem from barriers to mental health treatment and counseling.
“A lot of people in this city are living in survival mode and they have been exposed to a lot of trauma, but they don’t recognize it,” Robertson said. “It comes out in anger, it comes out in aggression, it comes out of being defensive, it comes out being violent.”
Stacey has a background in social work and now works with the next generation of scholars in higher education. Some of her videos encourage parents to show up for their kids at home, like her mother did for her family.
Stacey says Phyllis “Peaches” Brown quit her job to focus on her son when he started getting into trouble.
“Every lesson that I’m giving people are life lessons that my mother gave me,” she said. “She did everything she could to save her son’s life. She said, ‘I’m not burying my child.’ And so when I pose these questions to these parents, I’m like, when are you going to step up and really do whatever it takes to do whatever you need to keep your child safe? To keep them off the streets?
In one of her videos from April, Robertson talks about how fed up she is with seeing children as victims of gun violence. It’s tough love from a woman whose own family has been the victim of gun violence.
She said in one video from April, “This message goes out to all the parents of some of these children in the City of New Orleans. Y’all not f--- tired of burying y’all children? Y’all not tired of sitting on the front row at these funeral homes, these chapels, these churches? Y’all not f---- tired of releasing balloons for these children? Y’all not tired of giving the Dollar Tree and Party City your money?’
She told us, “A lot of our children are struggling with mental health issues. They’re struggling with the environments they’re living in. They’re struggling with poverty, they’re struggling with opportunities. They’re in these failing schools.”
Still, from her kitchen table, the unofficial News Anchor of New Orleans East is hoping she motivates her audience to vote, get involved, or redirect the future of the city she loves.
“I will never run out of content. It’s unfortunate. I would like to run out of content, I would like to shift my focus and start talking more about like mental health, because that’s something that’s very important to me. But every day it’s something,” she said.
Robertson said she recently became a victim of violent crime in her neighborhood. Following the example of sacrifice set by her mom, she says the right move for her family is setting a plan to move to the North Shore by the end of the year.
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