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”.

Harry Styles is a ‘Trojan horse’

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.”