The next generation of news
Shit You Should Care About has popularized a new model of news consumption: Have fun.
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
This might be the longest-distance Embedded interview ever conducted. —Kate
P.S. I did a fun interview with Ethan Sawyer of Human Pursuits. We talked about quitting social media, TikTok misinformation, and The 1975.
Three years of a pandemic, and I have radically changed my news consumption habits. I went into 2020 raw-dogging my Twitter feed and opening my browser to The New York Times, which was set as my home page. I left 2022 with everything muted and the NYT Cooking app autofilling in my browser nav. These days, I miss entire news cycles. The news I do willingly consume comes to me via newsletters, not doomscrolls.
As a sensitive soul, I need someone to dig into current events for me. Someone who will read all the alerts and takes and analysis and distill it down to the basics—preferably without leaving me more depressed than before. That person is Shit You Should Care About's Lucy Blakiston.
Shit You Should Care About is a New Zealand-based, Gen Z-focused mini media empire. It serves millions of followers across Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and Substack, plus two podcasts. Blakiston, the company's co-founder, launched SYSCA with her two best friends, Olivia and Ruby, as a Wordpress website in 2018.
“I was studying media studies and international relations and honestly, I was like, Why have I been here for three years and I don't understand shit?” she tells me over Zoom. “Like, I don't understand any of these world events my lecturers are referring to, or any of the readings I'm being given.”
So she approached her friends with a novel idea: “'I think we should start something called Shit You Should Care About, where people can give a shit about anything.' And that can be the environment or Harry Styles or protests in Iran or Formula One. Like you can actually care about whatever you want and we just want you to feel safe to do so.”
What began as a handful of Wordpress posts a week expanded to Instagram, where SYSCA now boasts over three million followers. The newsletter jumped from Revue to Substack late last year, where Blakiston sends out a news dispatch every weekday morning that surfaces the essential headlines with casual, sometimes chaotic, personality and plenty of emojis. The newsletter also includes original content, like this tell-all interview with the woman The 1975's Matty Healy kissed on stage.
Shit You Should Care About is an immediate open in my inbox. It's also indicative of how news is changing as the next generation takes the reigns. In this interview, Blakiston and I talk about building a nontraditional media empire, the Instagramification of news, and why traditional publishers should stop trying to reach Gen Z.
When did Shit You Should Care About become your full-time job?
It didn't become a full-time job until 2021. Honestly, it sat at like 900 followers on Instagram, and I don't even know how many reads on the WordPress blog, for ages. It was truly just for fun. I've always been obsessed with the online world and information gathering and communicating. I've always loved speaking, I've always loved writing. And so it was just something we did for fun. We grew it only because I loved doing it and was consistent with it.
I moved to Colombia and then I was in the US time zone when a lot of the—not first—but a lot of the quite bad abortion stories started happening. I think this was in 2019. And then we saw a big growth from America, which is why today 50 percent of our audience is American. So then I think it grew to like 40,000 in 2019, maybe 200,000 at the start of 2020. And then 2 million by the end of 2020.
What did that leap to full-time look like?
New Zealand has this government funding for the arts called New Zealand on Air. And basically someone I'd met in the industry rung me up and [explained] they put out a a request for proposal that had basically been written for us. It was like a non-traditional platform, serving youth, and it was to make a web series. I had never had any interest in video. We don't show our faces. So I'm like, How is this even gonna work? And then after a lot of convincing, [New Zealand on Air] were like, “We have a team that can help you make the thing if you just write it and lend your voice.” And I was like, “Okay.”
So me and Liv, our designer, we put in our pitch and then it got accepted, which basically meant that for six months Liv and I could pay ourselves to make this web series. Liv's one of the original co-founders. Ruby, the other co-founder, she was living in Auckland where we moved to make this web series, sort of with the idea that it'd be amazing to do this as a job. She luckily at the same time found us this one partnership [with] a Love Island podcast series, and it basically funded her to be able to leave her job and come and work with us. And then we were just like, “We have to figure it out now.” If we know that we can get funding from the government, which we haven't done again because we haven't actually had to, or we can get funding from partners—and this was before we even had a subscription model—then we were like, “We've been doing this for three years at this point. We can figure out how to make it a full-time job.” Some months at the start it was like, How are we gonna pay rent?
What platforms are you on now?
We're on Instagram, but super differently. I think after 2020 and watching the internet and watching people fight it out in the comments and seeing that people shouldn't really be getting their news solely from social media ... I'm lucky cuz I work around journalists and I studied this, so I can see that this probably isn't the best way to be giving or getting the news. So we still have Instagram, but I don't optimize my writing or the news we tell or anything for Instagram. It's more of a “you should come to the newsletter where we write more and give a bit more context.” Or “you should come to the podcast.” One of them is The Shit Show, which talks about the news each week, and Culture Vulture, which sort of talks about pop culture, but the way it's like either fucking with our mental health or impacting society for better or for worse. And also, it's just a way to reiterate that you can like pop culture and also be interested in the world and how it impacts the world.
Has the team grown at all?
Well as of this week it's just two of us. Rubes does the commercial stuff. I do all the content. Like if there's a voice that people hear, it's me. And then Liv, who is our designer, she's gone to do a big travel, go-and-explore-the-world [trip]. It's not a sad thing. It's a very happy thing. Along the way we've contracted some people to write for us. I get a lot of people just submitting things that they want published. We have designers that we'll contract in when we need them, but the team, the core team, is now just two.
I'm so impressed with how it's such a small team, but it really feels like a huge empire. What does a typical workday look like?
So if this is a good workday, as in I am functioning really well—which is like the backbone of SYSCA, I have to be happy and have slept well—I wake up at 5:00 a.m. And because I'm in New Zealand, the news often feels like it's happened overnight and I have this gorgeous, just, everything—all the newsletters I wanna read, or the news websites have updated. So when I wake up, I just consume a lot. A lot of that is from the audience. So I read a lot of emails from people saying, "This is happening here" or "This is a TikTok you should write about" or "Have you seen this?"
It's an hour of just trusting my gut and reading the responses from the audience to be like, “What are people gonna care about today and what's interesting and what's gonna not make us all feel like shit?” All these internal check boxes. “What's a good mundane poll? What have I been questioning lately?” And so usually by 7:00 a.m. I like to have it written, edited, and sent. I make mistakes so often ‘cause it's me writing, filtering, editing. But it's fine. I love a low-stakes error because it shows people that we're humans that write these things.
Two days out of the week I'll have a podcast to research and record and then send to Ruby, who edits them. She's like a Wonder Woman. She finds us all the partnerships, figures out how we're gonna pay rent, tells me where I need to be 24/7, edits all the podcasts. Just a legend. And then there's lots of calls with lots of people that wanna work with us, which more often than not just turn into nothing because we say no to most things that come our way, but we obviously like to hear everyone out. And then I've been really trying to, at 3:00 p.m., do nothing except for maybe go on TikTok and see what's trending, what's happening. Maybe try and write the newsletter, read some of my book. Because a huge part of my job is giving people recommendations. But more often than not, I'm answering emails. It's like a normal workday, but it starts at 5:00 a.m.
I feel like we're in a weird moment for news right now. I don't know how it is in New Zealand, but in America, so many publications are folding, reporters getting laid off, local news is gone. But also what you were saying, which I think is so interesting, that people were like, Oh wait, no, we can't just get our news from social media anymore. What is your thinking on news in this environment and what is motivating you when you go about sharing things?
I think the first thing is, I picture it as an ecosystem. I wouldn't exist without the work of newsrooms and people on the ground and journalists actually getting that firsthand, as-objective-as-possible sort of news. And so in my head, there's always a place for that. Of course there is. I think there is something about a lot of the newsrooms that reach out to me for advice or consulting or whatever, they're always trying to reach the youth. And sometimes I think there's actually nothing wrong with continuing to serve the audience that you serve because hopefully, all of us will grow up and we will have learned good media literacy and we will be reaching for these sources. We'll be going to the BBC and reading Vox or whatever for bigger, chunkier explainers. And so you shouldn't put all your focus into trying to grab the youth because hopefully we will grow up, and we still need that really good journalism that is quite high level. We're sort of like the middle man between really good information that's hard to understand—there's us trying to make sense of it in a way that's still factual and won't leave you feeling like shit.
I grew up in the clickbait era. I never paid for a newspaper. I never paid for a magazine. It was all just being served to me on social media. So it was never that good. And I know you've talked about this a little bit, but our slogan is "normalize paying for the media you love." Because if you find someone that you love and it's gonna make you want to read the news and understand it so that you feel more educated on things, you should pay them because it's a hard job and you know, we need to pay rent. So there's that whole trying to combat growing up on Facebook with free news that wasn't always the best news.
Obviously there are journalists at these outlets doing the work, but that middle man has become necessary. Why is that? It's weird to say this during the same conversation where I'm lamenting outlets shutting down, but it's like, there's just so much news. You could literally spend all day going directly to every single website and seeing what they're writing about. I think the most helpful thing now that we're all so plugged in is the people who do the work of going through all the information and being like, this is what you should care about.
Yeah. We do a mix. If it's a good day in the newsletter, I've done a little bit of original reporting. Like someone has sent me the way that the boys at their school are reacting to Andrew Tate, and I've talked to them, and I've been able to write how we feel and what we should do about this. And then also curation as in, “Here's this really good thing that's going on in the world. I'll give you a few sentences, but because it's a newsletter, I can link you to this person that's done the good work.” That's what was hard on Instagram. You can't have links in a caption. So you almost are stuck with your 10 slides max, praying that everyone is gonna interpret this the way that you want them to.
Everyone makes fun of the 2020 aesthetic of Instagram graphics, but that didn't happen for no reason. People were working with what they had on these platforms, and Instagram forces people to make things really simplified.
I think about like that time a lot, especially because we've moved more to podcasts and newsletters, but I always come down to: at least these people are doing something to try and help. Versus the commenter who's wanting you to, like, die for doing this. We weren't even getting paid in 2020 at all when this was huge on Instagram. We made no money off of it. And I just remember waking up and I'd have all these horrible messages. I don't read the Instagram messages anymore. Ruby and Liv would just be like, "Do not read them because you'll be too scared to do the thing you're good at and that's actually helping two million people." It's been such a weird time to build and grow a media company, but such a good time to decide not to have your faces involved. My personality is woven so heavily through it and I'm really proud that people feel connected to it without knowing who the fuck I am. They know a lot about my life and my family and things that I choose to share, but I think it's been a really good conscious decision to not to have our faces involved at all.
What would you say the purpose is of each platform you're on?
So many people, especially older newsrooms or older men in newsrooms who are trying to figure out how to reach the youth are like, “We'll just turn this article into a podcast and a TikTok blah blah blah.” No. They all have very different functions if you want to reach the right audiences on them. So Twitter is wonderful for connecting with fans and stans and figuring out where they're at. You have to take Twitter with a grain of salt as we know because sometimes the internet really feels a type of way about something and it's just not quite how the real world is thinking about something or how it should feel about something. So Twitter and TikTok are very low stakes. Use them more as brand awareness. We're here, we get it, it's fun and it should be fun, but it really shouldn't be that much more than that and I shouldn't waste too much in resources on it ‘cause there's two of us. And then podcasts are to speak deeper on a few topics—and there's something great about a conversation. Even this, you can hear each of us thinking through things, so you know that you shouldn't maybe attack someone for what they've said because you can hear that they're trying to make sense of it on the way, and that's sometimes quite a helpful thing to listen to because it's real life. So podcasts, great for nuance.
The newsletter is good because you're not trapped in algorithmic hell, you're in the inbox every morning with your pen pals, they can email you back, which is a way better way to get feedback than Instagram comments or tweets. The newsletter is my favorite thing that we do. Otherwise I wouldn't write it every morning. It's a mixed bag but it should give you a little bit of everything—except for the blues, it shouldn't give you the blues.
Also, fun and stupid mundane polls. Especially on Instagram, because I feel like it gives people a way to get out that 2020 need to fight online, but in a really low-stakes manner.
How would you describe your community? Do you have a relationship with them?
I do have a relationship with them. It's interesting 'cause I'll never meet most of them. They don't know what I look like. But we very much have a pen pal-style relationship, and I feel like at the start it was definitely that the audience were me—they're just someone that wants to care. They're probably interested in similar things or they want to know about new things. They're growing up with me as well. I'm 25. When we started we were 21. Most of our readers were between 18 to 24. Now I think 70 percent of them are 18 to 34. I know on TikTok it skews younger. The newsletter skews younger, which is actually great because I sometimes get people emailing me like, "I'm sitting at high school reading your newsletter." I'm like, How cool is that? That young people care so much? And that's why I keep doing this.
And then two, it's a real privilege that whenever something in the world happens, I feel like I'm doing something about it just by sharing it, and I don't take that for granted. Our audience is just anyone who wants to give a shit, but the people that pay for the media they love are slightly older. And so I love it ‘cause it's almost sponsoring the younger generation who doesn't have the income. Like they're paying for the work so then the young people can get it.
ugh my newsletter crush! I love u!
I feel like my newsletter universe is collapsing onto itself. You, AHP and SYSCA have been my mainstays for years, and now there's all this cross-pollination 😄