Lucy Blakiston of “Shit You Should Care About” Is Revolutionizing the News

Lucy Blakiston, the face behind Shit You Should Care About, loves the internet.

The online news platform debuted in 2018 and today has since amassed more than 3 million followers on Instagram. “I feel very f*cking passionately about the internet, I love the internet,” Blakiston tells Teen Vogue.

Before she started SYSCA with her friends Ruby Edwards and Olivia Mercer, Blakiston could have been characterized as an “audacious, obsessed, naive fangirl.” Now, six years into that journey, she’s swapped out naivety for being underestimated. “I’m often put in rooms with media men and I always make a point to dress really girly. I love pink, I’m five foot and very unassuming, and I love watching people slowly realize that I deserve to be there.”

The 27-year-old, who describes herself as “just a girl” from small-town Blenheim, New Zealand, is taking the whirlwind in stride. Fresh off the release of the Make It Make Sense book — the essential SYSCA take on life as a fan, a woman, and a voice in media, written with Bel Hawkins — Blakiston can feel her life changing, and it makes returning home that much more important.

“I have this strange sense that my life is changing in front of my eyes, right now,” she says. It’s the triumphs and defeats, the epic highs and lows of making the internet her full-time job. Yes, Blakiston has toured with her favorite author of all time, Dolly Alderton. Yes, she presented to a crowd of 70,000 at Web Summit in Lisbon, in the same space that One Direction once performed. And still there’s a sense of relief that’s unique only to the sound of plane wheels hitting the Blenheim tarmac, where she’ll be wrapped in the colossal love of friends and family.

SYSCA was born out of a need to simplify the news for young people, offering a space where they can get political updates and pop culture news. “Anything they want to care about and not feel stupid for loving, like Harry Styles or The Bachelor, but also caring about gay rights in India, or the climate,” Blakiston says. The platform started as a WordPress blog and eventually transformed into an Instagram account. “We can be the ones to change the news,” Blakiston recalls thinking.

It was also born after a tour Blakiston took of Southeast Asia. After arriving in Myanmar in 2017, she heard a lecture from someone who’d been imprisoned for reporting on the Rohingya crisis, which she’d previously not heard of.