The next generation of news
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.