Latest news with #Blakiston
CNBC
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- CNBC
27-year-old ran a One Direction fan account as a teen—now she runs a media brand with 3.4M followers including Lorde and Bella Hadid: 'I love my job'
Lucy Blakiston used to think working in media meant living a glitzy life wearing kitten heels, getting her nails done and working from chic offices. Instead, the 27-year-old runs her media empire, S--- You Should Care About, from her bedroom in Wellington, New Zealand, where she lives with six of her hometown friends and prefers the quieter life. The cheerful room is "where the magic happens," Blakiston tells CNBC Make It. It's where, starting at 5 a.m., she writes her daily newsletter that covers political and pop culture news for some 80,000 readers around the world, and posts updates to an Instagram following 3.4 million people strong, including Lorde, Bella Hadid, Madonna and, most surprisingly to Blakiston, Joe Rogan. "All I need is my friends, my family, my bike and my laptop, and I'm so happy," Blakiston says. Covering the news can be exhausting and depressing, yet Blakiston considers it a privilege to fill a gap in legacy media by providing access to global news to Gen Zers in language they can relate to — and make a living out of it. "I love my job," she says. Blakiston launched SYSCA in 2018 with two of her best friends, Ruby Edwards and Olivia Mercer. At first, the blog was a hobby for the three college students to break down complicated world issues, like the Rohingya crisis, for themselves and their friends while in between classes and part-time jobs. They aimed to deliver information that wasn't so "black and white" or "boring," Blakiston says. Part of making the news accessible to fellow Gen Zers was meeting them where they are — on social media pages like Instagram, TikTok and the platform now known as X. Blakiston says she channeled the skills she learned from running a One Direction fan account as a teen (social media management, photo editing and mobilizing an engaged audience) into creating SYSCA's distinct voice and approach to delivering "the news without the blues." For every post about war or the climate crisis is a "timeline cleanse" post featuring Harry Styles, or a mundane poll about whether cookware belongs in the dishwasher to help commenters channel their frustration into a lighthearted online debate. The news page exploded during the summer of 2020 as SYSCA worked to make sense of the Covid-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests, and elections in the U.S. and New Zealand. Celebrities like Ariana Grande and Billie Eilish shared SYSCA posts on Instagram, and the news page swelled to over 1 million followers. By the end of 2020, Blakiston was working for a media company and says her boss encouraged the trio to take SYSCA from a hobby to a full-fledged business. "He was like, 'Girl, you have 3 million people listening to what you're saying. Why are you not getting paid for this?'" Blakiston says. Blakiston, Edwards and Mercer rented an office in Auckland to turn SYSCA into a business; Edwards handled business partnerships, Mercer led design and Blakiston wrote the voice behind the brand. "People say, 'Don't go into business with your friends, but they obviously don't have friends like mine,'" Blakiston says of her co-founders. "I'm talking sisters. We've been friends since we were 14, and so we knew each other deeply." Over the years, Edwards and Mercer left to pursue other opportunities abroad. By 2023, Blakiston was the sole co-founder who wanted to keep SYSCA running. "They set it up; they got it looking great; they got us the confidence that people would pay for the work we did," Blakiston says. "And then it was kind of like, 'OK Luce, we've built you up. You can go and do it on your own.'" It's not always easy being a young woman working on the internet, let alone building a media company when the industry faces significant challenges. Global trust in the news is lower than it was during the height of the pandemic, according to research from Reuters, while selective news avoidance and concern about what's real and fake in online news ticked up in recent years. Blakiston counts her ex-boss, the one who encouraged her to take the leap with SYSCA, as a mentor and says he's given her the best advice: "Just be cute for you." Blakiston recalls him telling her, "You just need to make sure you're doing something that you're proud of, and don't take criticism from people that you wouldn't take opinions from in your real life." "I'm just being cute for me, and if people love it, great," she adds. "But at the end of the day, if I don't love it, I'm not going to be good at my job." That mindset is also why Blakiston says she doesn't shy away from being cringe on the Internet. "In the age of social media, if you want to be someone or put your work out there, you actually cannot worry about the audience. You have to be yourself and just do it. And if other people are gonna think that's cringe, that is a projection of them. That is not your problem. What other people are thinking about you is not your problem." These days, Blakiston runs her media company with another hometown friend and current roommate, Abby Laurenson, who handles design and runs the group's book club. The co-founder resists advice from others to scale up, which she considers "such a tech bro mindset." "I never want my job to be managing a team," she says. "I want my job to be talking directly to the people." SYSCA provides its daily newsletter for free and doesn't advertise on Instagram; it's funded by subscribers who pay $8 USD per month, or $80 USD per year, for access to premium content including the group's book club, personal essays and additional articles from paid contributing writers. Earlier this year, Blakiston co-wrote a book, "Make It Make Sense," and she also takes paid speaking and consulting gigs in order to re-invest earnings back into the business. Blakiston say she's "proud" that the money to keep SYSCA afloat "comes from people just supporting the newsletter and the work. I always say, 'Normalize paying for the media you love,' and that's what they do." Blakiston declined to share additional details about the business's earnings but says her main financial goals with SYSCA are to make enough money to cover her rent, pay contractors that help different parts of the business, and grow her network of paid contributing writers. "I make enough money to be able to do what I love and be happy," she says.
The Guardian
15-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
How a New Zealander working from her mum's kitchen started a news service read by Madonna
Lucy Blakiston, the 27-year-old founder of a thriving global media company, loves being underestimated. And swearing. 'I wear on purpose the girliest, pinkest, most colourful outfit to an event of tech-Bros,' she tells the Guardian from her home in New Zealand's capital, Wellington. 'I like them thinking, 'who the fuck is that and why is she here?' and then slowly start to release when I open my mouth and talk, 'oh, she knows what she's talking about.'' Blakiston is the founder of the online media platform Shit You Should Care About, a company that says it 'cuts through the bullshit' to make global issues and news accessible for broader and younger audiences. She trawls news websites to pull together easy-to-read stories on everything from celebrity culture to news on conflicts, which she then boils down to digestible snippets to share on Instagram, X and TikTok. Fans can also subscribe to a free newsletter and tune into podcasts, while paying subscribers fund the business. What began as a blog with her friends Ruby Edwards and Olivia Mercer in 2018, Shit You Should Care About has since amassed nearly four million followers on social media, including celebrities Bella Hadid, Madonna and, to Blakiston's surprise, Joe Rogan. It has more than 80,000 newsletter subscribers, and has spawned a podcast series and book titled Make It Make Sense. Nearly half of the platform's followers are based in the US, with another roughly 30% in the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. The company's success lies in meeting Blakiston's generation where they are: social media. Research by the Reuters Institute has found that engagement with news, especially among young people, has steadily declined over the past decade. Still, young people are using social platforms to source their information as trust in mainstream media also declines. In recent years, news aggregation accounts have proliferated on TikTok and Instagram. 'Lucy figured out really early they would have to show up in the places [young people] are and you have to speak the language,' said Duncan Greive, a media commentator and co-founder of The Spinoff, a New Zealand-based online news magazine. 'Picking Instagram as a platform, and then using the stylistic choices she made around how to make it presentable and palatable in those environments – that was the genius.' There's a tension over where these platforms sit in the broader news ecosystem or act as a substitute for legacy news sites, Greive said. Either way, he said, 'there are lessons in style, tone and distribution legacy media would do well to observe'. Between 2022 and 2023, Blakiston's fellow co-founders left the business to follow other pursuits, leaving Blakiston to run her media business alone from a small desk in her candy-coloured bedroom. Blakiston's home is a visual echo of her online world, embracing politics, pop 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 living room wall and tiny ceramic mushrooms peep up out of plant pots waiting to be moved into an outside 'fairy garden'. Online, Blakiston sandwiches bulletins on climate change, war and Indigenous rights between deep-dives into cultural shifts, 'mundane polls' – like 'Do you keep your eyes open or closed at the dentist?' – and 'timeline cleanses' of celebrity crushes, primarily Blakiston's hero, singer Harry Styles. 'Using Harry Styles can Trojan Horse people into caring about the news,' Blakiston said, adding that fandom – particularly when experienced by women and girls – is often derided but can be a powerful tool. 'The world is so happy to take money from fangirls, but it won't take them seriously,' she said. 'If you love a sport, you can become a sports commentator or sports journalist – but if you love a boyband, what options has the world told you you have?' Blakiston 'owes much' of Shit You Should Care About to loving One Direction. The skills she gained running a One Direction fan account as a teenager were instrumental to the construction of her media company – from editing and Photoshopping to mobilising large groups. Her celebration of Styles is an antidote to the onslaught of bad news. 'The ethos,' she said, 'is giving you the news, without the blues.' But amid the fun and frivolity, Blakiston also uses her platform to explore difficult subject matters – medicating depression and navigating grief after her brother's sudden death in 2019, for example, and deeply researched coverage of global crises. The latter, she views as complementary to – rather than a challenge against – legacy media. 'I see it as an ecosystem,' she said, describing herself as a middle man. 'I couldn't exist without good journalism.' Her venture was born from her own frustrations in trying to understand global issues while studying media and international relations at university in 2018. Around the same time, she travelled to Myanmar, where her exposure to the Rohingya crisis ignited a sociopolitical awakening. 'I was looking around one day and thinking, 'is anyone else struggling to make sense of all of this?'' she said, recounting her days sitting in her classes. Blakiston texted her friends proposing a blog where they could write what they wanted: 'Harry Styles, or the Bachelor or gay rights in India'. 'It has not strayed from those initial texts whatsoever, which I am deeply proud of,' she said. By June 2020, their Instagram account had 200,000 followers. Then, when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, her platform helped cut through misinformation, winning over celebrity fans, who – by sharing her posts – catapulted her page's following to a million by July. Blakiston remembers thinking: 'We have Ariana Grande coming to a Kiwi … who's just been laid off from her waitressing job from Covid, sitting at her mum's kitchen table.' 'It was the scariest time and the most exciting time … we went into panic mode … but it wasn't a deterrent, it was a moment of 'OK, you need to learn Lucy'.' Since then, the self-described 'obsessive' has thrown everything into the company. It's both a job and a hobby, she said, rising at 5am to spend hours digesting news, factchecking sources, and sending out newsletters and social media posts. When she is not up-skilling in technology, or presenting to international summits, she is cooking, reading and spending time with her friends – a close-knit group she said keeps her grounded and happy. 'Most of my days are thinking and pottering … watching Love Island, then trying to find a way to explain a big foreign policy announcement,' she laughs. 'But otherwise its a pretty normal fucking life.'
