Lucy Blakiston, the 27-year-old founding father of a thriving world media firm, loves being underestimated. And swearing.
“I put on on function the girliest, pinkest, most vibrant outfit to an occasion of tech-Bros,” she tells the Guardian from her dwelling in New Zealand’s capital, Wellington.
“I like them pondering, ‘who the fuck is that and why is she right here?’ after which slowly begin to launch after I open my mouth and discuss, ‘oh, she is aware of what she’s speaking about.’”
Blakiston is the founding father of the web media platform Shit You Ought to Care About, an organization that claims it “cuts by means of 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 every part from superstar tradition to information on conflicts, which she then boils right down to digestible snippets to share on Instagram, X and TikTok. Followers may subscribe to a free publication and tune into podcasts, whereas paying subscribers fund the enterprise.
What started as a weblog along with her associates 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 publication subscribers, and has spawned a podcast sequence 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 technology the place they’re: social media.
Analysis by the Reuters Institute has discovered that engagement with information, particularly amongst younger folks, has steadily declined over the previous decade.
Nonetheless, younger individuals are utilizing social platforms to supply their info as belief in mainstream media additionally declines. In recent times, 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 communicate the language,” stated Duncan Greive, a media commentator and co-founder of The Spinoff, a New Zealand-based on-line information journal. “Choosing Instagram as a platform, after which utilizing the stylistic decisions she made round how one can make it presentable and palatable in these environments – that was the genius.”
There’s a pressure over the place these platforms sit within the broader information ecosystem or act as an alternative to legacy information websites, Greive stated.
Both means, he stated, “there are classes in fashion, tone and distribution legacy media would do properly to look at”.
Harry Kinds is a ‘Computer virus’
Between 2022 and 2023, Blakiston’s fellow co-founders left the enterprise to comply with 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 report 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 Kinds.
“Utilizing Harry Kinds can Trojan Horse folks into caring in regards to the information,” Blakiston stated, including that fandom – notably when skilled by ladies and women – is usually derided however could be a highly effective software.
“The world is so blissful to take cash from fangirls, nevertheless it gained’t take them critically,” she stated. “Should you love a sport, you may change into a sports activities commentator or sports activities journalist – however in the event you love a boyband, what choices has the world instructed you you will have?”
Blakiston “owes a lot” of Shit You Ought to Care About to loving One Course. The abilities she gained operating a One Course fan account as a youngster had been instrumental to the development of her media firm – from enhancing and Photoshopping to mobilising massive teams.
Her celebration of Kinds is an antidote to the onslaught of dangerous information. “The ethos,” she stated, “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 tough 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 – moderately than a problem towards – legacy media. “I see it as an ecosystem,” she stated, describing herself as a center man. “I couldn’t exist with out good journalism.”
Her enterprise was born from her personal frustrations in making an attempt to grasp world points whereas learning media and worldwide relations at college in 2018. Across the identical time, she travelled to Myanmar, the place her publicity to the Rohingya disaster ignited a sociopolitical awakening.
“I used to be wanting round at some point and pondering, ‘is anybody else struggling to make sense of all of this?’” she stated, recounting her days sitting in her lessons.
Blakiston texted her associates proposing a weblog the place they might write what they wished: “Harry Kinds, or the Bachelor or homosexual rights in India”.
“It has not strayed from these preliminary texts in anyway, which I’m deeply pleased with,” she stated.
By June 2020, their Instagram account had 200,000 followers. Then, when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, her platform helped minimize by means of misinformation, profitable over superstar followers, who – by sharing her posts – catapulted her web page’s following to one million by July.
Blakiston remembers pondering: “We’ve got 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 … nevertheless it wasn’t a deterrent, it was a second of ‘OK, you could be taught Lucy’.”
Since then, the self-described “obsessive” has thrown every part into the corporate. It’s each a job and a passion, she stated, rising at 5am to spend hours digesting information, factchecking sources, and sending out newsletters and social media posts.
When she will not be up-skilling in know-how, or presenting to worldwide summits, she is cooking, studying and spending time along with her associates – a close-knit group she stated retains her grounded and blissful.
“Most of my days are pondering and pottering … watching Love Island, then looking for a strategy to clarify an enormous international coverage announcement,” she laughs. “However in any other case its a fairly regular fucking life.”
