Sh*t You Should Care About: Live
Summary
Lucy Blakiston, founder of the media company 'Sh*t You Should Care About' (SYSCA), delivers a live show at SXSW that takes the audience through a personal and professional retrospective of how she accidentally built a global media empire starting from a university group chat in New Zealand. The talk blends candid storytelling, audience Q&A via an in-app question tool, and a live mundane poll, creating an interactive format that mirrors the community-driven ethos of SYSCA itself.
Lucy traces the origin of SYSCA to 2018, when she and two university friends — Ruby and Liv — started a WordPress blog aimed at making the news accessible and engaging for young people who found traditional journalism dry and impenetrable. What began as a blog quickly migrated to Instagram, where Lucy recognized that putting news where young people actually were (social media) was more effective than waiting for them to come to a blog. The account grew steadily to 60,000 followers by end of 2019, then exploded during COVID-19 in 2020, reaching 1 million followers within a month and then 3.4 million followers shortly after, driven by daily no-nonsense COVID updates at a time when the world felt chaotic and people craved clarity. A key strategic decision early on was to run the account anonymously for about five years — no faces, just brains — which Lucy credits as a major factor in building an audience that valued the content over the personality.
A recurring and deliberate thread throughout the talk is Lucy's 'University of One Direction': her teenage years running a 60,000-follower One Direction fan account on Twitter, which she frames as her real media education. She learned content curation, viral mechanics, hashtag strategy, meme creation, media literacy (spotting fake images in fan edits), live-stream transcription, community organizing for petition and voting campaigns, and fan fiction editing — all skills that directly transferred to running a news media company. This framing is a pointed argument that fangirl culture and fan communities are dismissed unfairly as frivolous, when in fact they are sophisticated training grounds for digital media, community management, and audience building.
The second half of the session is driven by live audience questions and covers a range of practical and philosophical topics: how to fight news fatigue and desensitization (Lucy attributes it to algorithmic flattening of all content to the same emotional weight), how to verify fake news (Lucy's current approach is to assume everything is fake first and then verify, a reversal from her earlier training-based confidence), her relationship with legacy media (she sees SYSCA as a 'second port of call' that depends on legacy journalism, not a competitor), how she monetizes without putting news behind a paywall (free daily newsletter, book sales, selective brand partnerships), and what she would do differently if starting today (begin with newsletter, Instagram, and TikTok — not a blog). The talk closes with a deeply personal note about her favorite newsletter to write: an annual good-news edition published every September 28th in honor of her late brother Jimmy, who loved Formula 1, ducks, and rocket ships.
Key Takeaways
- •SYSCA grew from 0 to 3.4 million Instagram followers between 2018 and mid-2020, with COVID-19 acting as a catalyst — reaching 1 million followers in roughly one month during July 2020.
- •Running the account anonymously for ~5 years was a deliberate and effective strategy: it built an audience that came for the content, not the personality, and let Lucy develop her voice without public scrutiny of her appearance or background.
- •Lucy frames her teenage One Direction fan account (60,000 Twitter followers) as her real media education — she learned content curation, viral mechanics, hashtag strategy, meme detection, live-stream transcription, community organizing, and media literacy all through fan culture.
- •The mix of pop culture (Harry Styles content) with hard news was controversial early on — a manager of Australia's top influencer advised her to create a 'Harry Hour' — but Lucy refused, arguing that people's interests don't separate neatly by time of day, and that mixing culture and news was a feature, not a bug.
- •Lucy's current approach to fake news verification has flipped: instead of starting from a position of trust and checking for fakes, she now assumes everything is fake first and verifies it is real before posting — a direct response to AI-generated images and deepfakes.
- •She posted a real-seeming AI-generated image of Harry Styles without realizing it was fake, which she uses as a low-stakes lesson about the dangers of posting before verifying — even for someone who has studied journalism.
- •SYSCA does not compete with legacy media — Lucy describes it as a 'second port of call' that depends on traditional journalism's reporters and resources; she argues legacy media needs better funding models that don't rely on audiences.
- •The newsletter (500,000 daily readers) is Lucy's favorite and most effective medium because it bypasses algorithmic suppression: it lands directly in subscribers' inboxes, reaching people who have actively chosen to be there.
Transcript
[music] Hey, I like the way I love you. [music] Get ready. [music] >> Hi. [cheering] I'm obsessed with this like big comfy chair they've got for me. Also, I feel like I should note that these shoes have only come out for two reasons. One was for a Harry Styles concert and the other is for right now because I actually can't last very long in them, but I thought we're in Austin. I should get my cowboy boots on. Um, so I'm Lucy and as the video just showed you, I run something called [ __ ] You Sho...
