27-year-old ran a One Direction fan account as a teen—now she runs a media brand with 3.4M followers including Lorde and Bella Hadid: 'I love my job'
Instead, the 27-year-old runs her media empire, S--- You Should Care About, from her bedroom in Wellington, New Zealand, where she lives with six of her hometown friends and prefers the quieter life.
The cheerful room is "where the magic happens," Blakiston tells CNBC Make It. It's where, starting at 5 a.m., she writes her daily newsletter that covers political and pop culture news for some 80,000 readers around the world, and posts updates to an Instagram following 3.4 million people strong, including Lorde, Bella Hadid, Madonna and, most surprisingly to Blakiston, Joe Rogan.
"All I need is my friends, my family, my bike and my laptop, and I'm so happy," Blakiston says.
Covering the news can be exhausting and depressing, yet Blakiston considers it a privilege to fill a gap in legacy media by providing access to global news to Gen Zers in language they can relate to — and make a living out of it. "I love my job," she says.
Blakiston launched SYSCA in 2018 with two of her best friends, Ruby Edwards and Olivia Mercer. At first, the blog was a hobby for the three college students to break down complicated world issues, like the Rohingya crisis, for themselves and their friends while in between classes and part-time jobs.
They aimed to deliver information that wasn't so "black and white" or "boring," Blakiston says. Part of making the news accessible to fellow Gen Zers was meeting them where they are — on social media pages like Instagram, TikTok and the platform now known as X.
Blakiston says she channeled the skills she learned from running a One Direction fan account as a teen (social media management, photo editing and mobilizing an engaged audience) into creating SYSCA's distinct voice and approach to delivering "the news without the blues." For every post about war or the climate crisis is a "timeline cleanse" post featuring Harry Styles, or a mundane poll about whether cookware belongs in the dishwasher to help commenters channel their frustration into a lighthearted online debate.
The news page exploded during the summer of 2020 as SYSCA worked to make sense of the Covid-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests, and elections in the U.S. and New Zealand. Celebrities like Ariana Grande and Billie Eilish shared SYSCA posts on Instagram, and the news page swelled to over 1 million followers.
By the end of 2020, Blakiston was working for a media company and says her boss encouraged the trio to take SYSCA from a hobby to a full-fledged business.
"He was like, 'Girl, you have 3 million people listening to what you're saying. Why are you not getting paid for this?'" Blakiston says.
Blakiston, Edwards and Mercer rented an office in Auckland to turn SYSCA into a business; Edwards handled business partnerships, Mercer led design and Blakiston wrote the voice behind the brand.
"People say, 'Don't go into business with your friends, but they obviously don't have friends like mine,'" Blakiston says of her co-founders. "I'm talking sisters. We've been friends since we were 14, and so we knew each other deeply."
Over the years, Edwards and Mercer left to pursue other opportunities abroad. By 2023, Blakiston was the sole co-founder who wanted to keep SYSCA running.
"They set it up; they got it looking great; they got us the confidence that people would pay for the work we did," Blakiston says. "And then it was kind of like, 'OK Luce, we've built you up. You can go and do it on your own.'"
It's not always easy being a young woman working on the internet, let alone building a media company when the industry faces significant challenges. Global trust in the news is lower than it was during the height of the pandemic, according to research from Reuters, while selective news avoidance and concern about what's real and fake in online news ticked up in recent years.
Blakiston counts her ex-boss, the one who encouraged her to take the leap with SYSCA, as a mentor and says he's given her the best advice: "Just be cute for you."
Blakiston recalls him telling her, "You just need to make sure you're doing something that you're proud of, and don't take criticism from people that you wouldn't take opinions from in your real life."
"I'm just being cute for me, and if people love it, great," she adds. "But at the end of the day, if I don't love it, I'm not going to be good at my job."
That mindset is also why Blakiston says she doesn't shy away from being cringe on the Internet. "In the age of social media, if you want to be someone or put your work out there, you actually cannot worry about the audience. You have to be yourself and just do it. And if other people are gonna think that's cringe, that is a projection of them. That is not your problem. What other people are thinking about you is not your problem."
These days, Blakiston runs her media company with another hometown friend and current roommate, Abby Laurenson, who handles design and runs the group's book club. The co-founder resists advice from others to scale up, which she considers "such a tech bro mindset."
"I never want my job to be managing a team," she says. "I want my job to be talking directly to the people."
SYSCA provides its daily newsletter for free and doesn't advertise on Instagram; it's funded by subscribers who pay $8 USD per month, or $80 USD per year, for access to premium content including the group's book club, personal essays and additional articles from paid contributing writers. Earlier this year, Blakiston co-wrote a book, "Make It Make Sense," and she also takes paid speaking and consulting gigs in order to re-invest earnings back into the business.
Blakiston say she's "proud" that the money to keep SYSCA afloat "comes from people just supporting the newsletter and the work. I always say, 'Normalize paying for the media you love,' and that's what they do."
Blakiston declined to share additional details about the business's earnings but says her main financial goals with SYSCA are to make enough money to cover her rent, pay contractors that help different parts of the business, and grow her network of paid contributing writers.
"I make enough money to be able to do what I love and be happy," she says.
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