Lucy Blakiston writes to millions of people like they are her only reader, and spent years making sure none of them knew her face

There is a specific kind of frustration that most people let pass. You are sitting in a lecture about how the world works, being handed the world, and none of it lands. The information is technically correct and emotionally inert. Almost everybody who feels this shrugs and gets on with the degree.

Lucy Blakiston texted her two best friends from home. Ruby Edwards and Olivia Mercer said yes, and the three of them put up a WordPress site in 2018 with a name nobody's parents would approve of. The premise was that you should be allowed to care about things without a credential first, and that being a non-expert was not a disqualification but the entire point of the exercise.

The fan account was the apprenticeship

The detail everyone reaches for is that she ran a One Direction fan account as a teenager, and it usually gets told as a punchline. It is closer to a training programme. Running a fan account at scale means learning what makes somebody stop scrolling, how to crop an image so it reads at thumbnail size, how to post at the hour your people are awake, and how to hold a voice steady across thousands of posts so the account feels like a person rather than a feed.

That is a media education. It just did not come with a tuition invoice. When she pointed the same instincts at Sudan, at elections, at whatever the internet was arguing about that morning, the mechanics already worked. What changed was the subject.

The account went from around nine hundred followers to two million by the end of 2020, roughly half of them in America, which is an unusual thing to build from New Zealand.

Faceless on purpose

For years the striking thing about Shit You Should Care About was that it did not have a face. The newsletter arrived signed Luce, opening with something like 'my angel', reading like a pen pal who happened to have read every wire service that morning, and for a long stretch the audience had no idea what she looked like. In an industry where the whole growth strategy is usually to become the personality, she withheld the personality and kept the intimacy.

It is a sharper trick than it sounds. The warmth is real and the parasocial pull is enormous, but it attaches to the voice rather than the person, which means the thing can survive her having a bad week. She has described what she is making as a very non-depressing place to come and get your news of the day, which sounds soft until you notice she is delivering famine coverage inside it.

The business grew up around that voice rather than around a brand deck. The newsletter moved from Revue to Substack at the end of 2022, the core team stayed small enough to count on one hand, and the whole apparatus is reader-supported rather than dependent on whoever wants to buy influence over the news of the day.

The part where talking stops being enough

In August 2026 she launched Give A Shit, and it is the most interesting thing she has done since starting the account. Eight years of telling millions of people what is happening in the world builds up a debt. At some point the audience has been told, repeatedly, and telling them again is not the same as doing anything.

So the platform now raises money. The first campaign is Sudan, run with UNICEF Aotearoa, and she has committed her own money to it and floated going there herself to document where it lands. That last part matters more than the pledge: fundraising through an audience is easy to start and hard to stay accountable to, and going to look is the version that costs something.

The through line, if you want one, has been the same since the lecture. Take the thing that is being explained badly to people who deserve better, and explain it like you actually like them.

Give a Shit is where SYSCA stops just talking about the world and starts doing something about it.

Luce, launching the fundraising arm in August 2026