A new video-forward news outlet lets congressmembers get ‘wonky’

By Kris Seavers

There’s a newsletter boom in the business of covering Capitol Hill. Shortform video and podcasts are big, too. But 535 News is taking a different approach. 

“I love all the newsletters, I think they’re really smart,” said co-founder and executive producer Kristin Wilson. “[But] nobody does a video-based show on the actual policy of Congress.”

535 News launched in May, only six months after its conception during a conversation at a Christmas party, Wilson shared. The idea is to platform long-form interviews with congressmembers on YouTube, allowing them to speak at length on topics that might otherwise not get airtime. 

The show streams when Congress is in session — for over two hours per day Tuesday through Thursday — and is free, thanks to advertising geared toward policymakers, lobbyists, and engaged voters. The website also features op-eds from representatives and nonprofit leaders; one recent article highlighted a bipartisan bill to get easier healthcare access for individuals with metastatic breast cancer. 

“I want to geek out and talk about nerdy policy,” said Wilson, who brings over two decades of broadcast experience, including 10 years as supervising producer for CNN’s D.C. coverage. She described 535 as a news channel to cover “that wonky stuff” that major networks don’t have bandwidth for. 

She wants politicians who don’t regularly make headlines to show the quieter work being done in Congress, pointing to the bipartisan Baby Changing on Board Act, which mandates baby changing stations in bathrooms on Amtrak trains. The bill passed unanimously in the Senate in May and will go back to the House for final approval before needing the president’s signature.

“​​Is it like the flashiest, coolest stuff? No. But do their constituents care?” Wilson said.

While much of the anticipated audience is fellow representatives, staffers, and others in the immediate orbit of the Hill, Wilson also hopes 535 will platform representatives whose media reputations — for better or for worse — may precede them. 

“Everybody’s got all these notions of who [congressmembers] are, and they’re wrong,” Wilson said. “Some of them we peg pretty accurately, but some of them we’re just letting somebody else tell us who they are. Why don’t we let them tell us who they are?”

Part-time contributing reporters to 535 News include Leigh Ann Caldwell and Marianna Sotomayor, who both went to Puck after the Washington Post, and Paul Kane, who covers Congress full-time at NOTUS. In addition to Wilson, the leadership team includes editor-in-chief Brody Mullins, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, and publisher David “Woody” Woodruff, a former railroad lobbyist and congressional aide who now works in government relations.

Wilson said the contributors’ home publications have been “very generous” with allowing their staffers to make time for 535 News in an arrangement she thinks is “good for everybody.” 

535’s commitment to long-form video isn’t the only thing setting it apart: It’s also a nonpartisan entity entering an increasingly partisan news landscape. With many journalists’ careers and outlets’ futures in limbo, Wilson sees a fork in the road. 

“I worry that the pathway to success is outrage or controversy,” Wilson said. “Journalists have to be incredibly careful that you might have a side, but you can’t show a side. Or you just have to lean into it, and be like, ‘This is who I am now,’ and let the viewership decide on that.”

535 News will aim to cut through some of that division and provide updates directly from the source.

Another hope, she said, is that 535 can do something to offset the “travesty” of local news shrinkage. She described the platform as a sort of 21st-century newswire — an “affiliate feed” — transmitting representatives’ words and work to local newsrooms across the country that may no longer have staff or resources to cover the politicians working for their states. 

“This gives you access to them,” she explained, noting that aiding local newsrooms is a lot of work. 

“But we’re gonna do it anyway,” she said.