Lucy Blakiston: The woman with the golden wings
Lucy Blakiston. Photo: Richard Briggs
Britt Coker speaks to a local writer who doomscrolls the internet to save her global audience the trouble.
If Lucy Blakiston had a magic wand, she would make newspapers popular again. This, from a woman who has 3.4 million followers on Instagram. Bring back the papers and tone down the social media. But until that wand shows up, Lucy will continue to do what she has been doing for the last six years: news-crunch for her followers. She digests daily the latest global news, regurgitating the tastiest morsels into an emailed newsletter for 100,000 people to read. But in a fun, crazy, creative and animated, ‘love you xoxo’ kind of way that speaks to her generation of 20- to 30-somethings. Officially, it’s called ‘Shit You Should Care About’ (SYSCA), but she’s also delivering it fairly upbeat, “Giving them the news without giving them the blues.”
SYSCA sprang from a university lecture, which Lucy sat in as a third-year student of International Relations and Media Studies. “It just felt like the news was really black and white and used huge words and was quite long winded and boring, dare I say? And so, I texted Ruby and Liv, my childhood best friends from Blenheim, and I was like, ‘Hey, should we start something called ‘Shit You Should Care About’, where we try and make all of this make sense a bit more?’ And then six years later, here we are. That’s my whole job.”
A whole job Lucy now does on her own after several years working on it with her friends. Her day starts at 5am every morning, when she begins scouring a diverse range of news sources, from the New York Times and the BBC News to the tech savvy The Verge, looking for stories that will be interesting, entertaining and inspiring. She has developed a strong sense of what her readers want to know, intuition is mixed in there as well.
“It’s like a digest of what’s happening in the world, and it’s nice because it doesn’t live on social media, so it’s not decided by the algorithm, who gets to see what news. That’s my favourite part of the whole business – the newsletter – because people are reading it in their bed. It feels very intimate. It almost feels like I have pen pals, because they always reply, and everyone’s so sweet.”
Everyone is sweet – except for the people that aren’t. But don’t we all recognise now that if you are an elitist pedant or salty troll, your comments say way more about you than who you’re complaining about. Lucy doesn’t care most of the time. She’s surrounded by people who love her and she has a strong sense of self. You can tell who the centered people are because they dress to suit themselves and speak what’s on their mind. They might begin a text to a stranger with ‘hi darling!’ and sign off their emails with love and kisses. All the stuff you do when your heart is full, when you feel in control of your own destiny and trust you are on to something, whatever that something may be. “I think that’s worked in my favour and hopefully shows a lot of people that just because there is a way that everyone does something doesn’t mean you need to do it that way.”
The algorithm gods play havoc with our social feeds. Lucy observes the metrics from her Instagram engine room. The harmless stories about Harry Styles garner greater reach than her more important news posts because Mr Styles will get plenty of positive engagement, which in turn, will make us feel more interested in scrolling the social media platform invested in remaining relevant.
Lucy loves newspapers because she is wistful for a time when content was provided in measured amounts. There was the 6 o’clock news, the paper inyour mailbox, and gaps in between for simple things like talking to people in the same room as you. There wasn’t a massive onslaught of information coming at you, which is the only life that 21st century young people have ever known.
She admits to hopping on a human hamster wheel when she first started caring about shit. She became obsessed with the news and watching the platform grow. It’s hard to not work in the weekend when new news becomes old so quickly. But about two years ago, she got off the wheel. For work at least.
“I feel like I’m not on social media that much anymore, and that’s been really good for me. I do it for my job when I have to, and then, honestly, at the end of the day, I do go on TikTok for a really long time because I love it, but it’s not for work, it’s for fun. That’s why I have to live in a small town like Blenheim, I feel like I live this huge, crazy life, but from a really quiet place. And that has been the recipe, I think, for me being able to actually keep doing this job.”
“I spent a little while in Wellington and a little while in Auckland, and I even lived in Colombia for a little while, and I wrote the book in Lisbon. And every time I just was like, I’m not getting out of my house as much as I know I could be, and I’m just not thriving like I do when I come home. So then I decided, well, you’ve tried it all out. And one of the best things about going away is you either figure out that you love being away, or you figure out that you love being home. And for me, I love being home.”
The book she is referring to is Make It Make Sense, that she co-wrote with her friend, Bel Hawkins. “I think it’s things that I feel braver to say, because there’s no comment section commenting on every little thing. It’s more personal than what I would put on the internet, and it dives a lot into the things I love about the online world and also the things that aren’t so good about it when you’re a teenager growing up on social media.”
“The biggest sort of feedback we’ve had is like, ‘God, I wish I had this when I was growing up’. And actually, I wrote a lot about grief in it, which is something that young people don’t really talk a lot about. I mean, I hope they don’t have to, because it sucks to lose someone when you’re young. But I lost my little brother, and I really felt like this was an experience that I wanted to make young people feel like, hey, it’s actually it’s going to be okay, even though it feels like your world is ending… So I hope they feel seen and heard and loved.”
The death of her brother James five years ago was “the worst that could happen”. But she came out of an incredibly difficult experience with a new level of fearlessness, and a belief that she is not doing this just for herself.
“We wrote a whole chapter on this, and it’s called ‘How to Phoenix’. It’s about when you have been in the ashes, you have literally been as far down as you’ve ever been, and… it’s that whole new lease on life that you get that you wouldn’t have had if you hadn’t gone through that really bad thing. So that’s actually one thing that so many people from the book have started using. They message me, ‘Lucy, I’m phoenixing; I was having such a shit time, and now I’m feeling all gold and phoenixing.’”
When you light a newspaper, it burns to ashes too. There is no going back to large scale reliance on the daily paper, but Phoenix Lucy has adapted the framework to make it work for her. She loves her life, her job, her readers. She feels positive about a book that has meaning to her, that is helping others. So how far forward is this self-starter looking, especially living a life so based in the present? “I don’t plan, and I don’t really set goals, but my biggest mantra is that I’m just always ready. I’m always ready to say yes to something that comes along.”
And then, with the beat of the wings and a “Bye darlings xoxo,” she’ll be away.