Shit You Should Care About: a New Zealand media company

Most of New Zealand’s best-known media companies were built inside newsrooms. Shit You Should Care About was built in the back of a lecture theatre.

What began in 2018 as a blog shared between three Wellington university students has become one of the clearest local examples of modern media being built entirely outside the old institutional model. It has no masthead, no print edition and no newsroom in the traditional sense. What it has instead is an audience of millions who trust it to explain the world without making them feel stupid for asking.

Where it started

Shit You Should Care About, usually shortened to SYSCA, was founded in 2018 by Lucy Blakiston, Ruby Edwards and Olivia Mercer, three childhood friends from Blenheim who were studying together at Victoria University of Wellington. The idea came to Blakiston in an international relations lecture, frustrated that the news she was being handed felt as though it had been written for someone else. She texted the other two and the three of them began turning complicated world events into something they would actually want to read.

It started as a WordPress blog. It grew through Instagram, a daily newsletter, podcasts and a tone of voice that was unmistakably its own.

What made it different

SYSCA’s insight was not that young people needed to be told to care. It was that they already cared and were being poorly served. Traditional coverage often felt inaccessible, too much jargon, too much assumed knowledge, too little warmth. SYSCA wrote the way its audience actually spoke: plain-language explanations, cultural fluency, humour and emotional honesty, sitting side by side with serious reporting on politics and global affairs.

The platform never pretended its readers should already know everything. That single editorial decision, to explain rather than to assume, became its defining feature.

Why it worked

The timing helped. By the late 2010s, social feeds had become the front door to information for a generation and SYSCA met its audience exactly where they already were. The platform’s following surged during 2020, when Covid-19, the Black Lives Matter movement and a run of elections left people locked down, anxious and hungry for context they could actually follow.

SYSCA gave them that context in a register that felt human. It was informal without being careless and serious without being cold.

More than an Instagram page

It would be easy to file SYSCA under “social media account”, but that undersells what has been built. The brand now spans a daily newsletter, podcasts, brand partnerships and a 2024 book, Make It Make Sense, co-authored by Blakiston with the writer and poet Bel Hawkins. Each channel deepens the relationship with the audience and reduces the platform’s dependence on any single algorithm.

The founding trio has since changed shape. Edwards and Mercer moved on to other ventures and by 2023 Blakiston had taken sole ownership, running SYSCA as founder and chief executive. In 2026 she was named Go Media Young New Zealander of the Year for her work making the news more accessible to young people.

Why it matters

SYSCA belongs on Noteworthy because it is not simply content, it is a business built around attention, trust and cultural timing. It is a New Zealand media export, a creator-led brand and a case study in how tone can be a genuine strategic advantage rather than a stylistic afterthought.

Above all, it is proof that modern media can be built from clarity, care and community, rather than from the authority of an established institution. You can read more about how that audience was built in How SYSCA built a global youth media brand from New Zealand, and see where the company sits among New Zealand media founders to watch.

Sources: Kea New Zealand · BusinessDesk · Kiwibank NZ Awards