Lucy Blakiston, the 27-year-old founding father of a thriving world media firm, loves being underestimated. And swearing.
“I put on on goal the girliest, pinkest, most vibrant outfit to an occasion of tech-Bros,” she tells the Guardian from her residence in New Zealand’s capital, Wellington.
“I like them considering, ‘who the fuck is that and why is she right here?’ after which slowly begin to launch once I open my mouth and speak, ‘oh, she is aware of what she’s speaking about.’”
Blakiston is the founding father of the net media platform Shit You Should Care About, an organization that claims it “cuts via the bullshit” to make world points and information accessible for broader and youthful audiences.
She trawls information web sites to tug collectively easy-to-read tales on all the things from superstar tradition to information on conflicts, which she then boils right down to digestible snippets to share on Instagram, X and TikTok. Followers can even subscribe to a free e-newsletter and tune into podcasts, whereas paying subscribers fund the enterprise.
What started as a weblog together with her mates Ruby Edwards and Olivia Mercer in 2018, Shit You Ought to Care About has since amassed practically 4 million followers on social media, together with celebrities Bella Hadid, Madonna and, to Blakiston’s shock, Joe Rogan. It has greater than 80,000 e-newsletter subscribers, and has spawned a podcast collection and ebook titled Make It Make Sense. Practically half of the platform’s followers are primarily based within the US, with one other roughly 30% within the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
The corporate’s success lies in assembly Blakiston’s era the place they’re: social media.
Analysis by the Reuters Institute has discovered that engagement with information, particularly amongst younger individuals, has steadily declined over the previous decade.
Nonetheless, younger persons are utilizing social platforms to supply their info as belief in mainstream media additionally declines. Lately, information aggregation accounts have proliferated on TikTok and Instagram.
“Lucy found out actually early they must present up within the locations [young people] are and it’s a must to converse the language,” mentioned Duncan Greive, a media commentator and co-founder of The Spinoff, a New Zealand-based on-line information journal. “Selecting Instagram as a platform, after which utilizing the stylistic decisions she made round find out how to make it presentable and palatable in these environments – that was the genius.”
There’s a stress over the place these platforms sit within the broader information ecosystem or act as an alternative choice to legacy information websites, Greive mentioned.
Both manner, he mentioned, “there are classes in model, tone and distribution legacy media would do nicely to watch”.
Harry Types is a ‘Computer virus’
Between 2022 and 2023, Blakiston’s fellow co-founders left the enterprise to observe different pursuits, leaving Blakiston to run her media enterprise alone from a small desk in her candy-coloured bed room.
Blakiston’s house is a visible echo of her on-line world, embracing politics, popular culture and whimsy. The red-black-and-white flag of Māori sovereignty hangs in her hallway, Charli xcx’s record brat is displayed on her front room wall and tiny ceramic mushrooms peep up out of plant pots ready to be moved into an out of doors “fairy backyard”.
On-line, Blakiston sandwiches bulletins on local weather change, conflict and Indigenous rights between deep-dives into cultural shifts, “mundane polls” – like “Do you retain your eyes open or closed on the dentist?” – and “timeline cleanses” of superstar crushes, primarily Blakiston’s hero, singer Harry Styles.
“Utilizing Harry Types can Trojan Horse individuals into caring concerning the information,” Blakiston mentioned, including that fandom – notably when skilled by ladies and ladies – is commonly derided however could be a highly effective software.
“The world is so comfortable to take cash from fangirls, however it gained’t take them significantly,” she mentioned. “Should you love a sport, you possibly can grow to be a sports activities commentator or sports activities journalist – however in case you love a boyband, what choices has the world informed you you’ve gotten?”
Blakiston “owes a lot” of Shit You Ought to Care About to loving One Course. The talents she gained working a One Course fan account as an adolescent had been instrumental to the development of her media firm – from modifying and Photoshopping to mobilising massive teams.
Her celebration of Types is an antidote to the onslaught of unhealthy information. “The ethos,” she mentioned, “is supplying you with the information, with out the blues.”
However amid the enjoyable and frivolity, Blakiston additionally makes use of her platform to discover troublesome topic issues – medicating despair and navigating grief after her brother’s sudden demise in 2019, for instance, and deeply researched protection of world crises.
The latter, she views as complementary to – quite than a problem in opposition to – legacy media. “I see it as an ecosystem,” she mentioned, describing herself as a center man. “I couldn’t exist with out good journalism.”
Her enterprise was born from her personal frustrations in attempting to grasp world points whereas finding out media and worldwide relations at college in 2018. Across the identical time, she travelled to Myanmar, the place her publicity to the Rohingya crisis ignited a sociopolitical awakening.
“I used to be wanting round sooner or later and considering, ‘is anybody else struggling to make sense of all of this?’” she mentioned, recounting her days sitting in her courses.
Blakiston texted her mates proposing a weblog the place they may write what they needed: “Harry Types, or the Bachelor or homosexual rights in India”.
“It has not strayed from these preliminary texts in any way, which I’m deeply pleased with,” she mentioned.
By June 2020, their Instagram account had 200,000 followers. Then, when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, her platform helped reduce via misinformation, successful over superstar followers, who – by sharing her posts – catapulted her web page’s following to one million by July.
Blakiston remembers considering: “We have now Ariana Grande coming to a Kiwi … who’s simply been laid off from her waitressing job from Covid, sitting at her mum’s kitchen desk.”
“It was the scariest time and essentially the most thrilling time … we went into panic mode … however it wasn’t a deterrent, it was a second of ‘OK, it is advisable to study Lucy’.”
Since then, the self-described “obsessive” has thrown all the things into the corporate. It’s each a job and a interest, she mentioned, rising at 5am to spend hours digesting information, factchecking sources, and sending out newsletters and social media posts.
When she isn’t up-skilling in expertise, or presenting to worldwide summits, she is cooking, studying and spending time together with her mates – a close-knit group she mentioned retains her grounded and comfortable.
“Most of my days are considering and pottering … watching Love Island, then looking for a approach to clarify a giant international coverage announcement,” she laughs. “However in any other case its a fairly regular fucking life.”
