'It felt like exploitation, and I just couldn't do it.'
New Zealander Jen Eastwood carved out a global audience for her true crime stories on You Tube and TikTok, but then it started to feel wrong.
Jen Eastwood spent countless hours, researching and investigating and producing true crime content.
People loved it, she had tens of thousands of subscribers, hundreds of thousands of views, but eventually it became too much.
The hours it took, the moral dilemma of creating content about the worst moments in people's lives and the voyeuristic delight people take in consuming this material; so, she stopped.
Jen Eastwood's latest project is the Sick Sad Lit podcast.
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Long interested in true crime, Eastwood started building an audience on You Tube, she told RNZ Nights.
“This sounds yuck to say, there's a huge gap in the market for New Zealand content specifically, globally, because that's the thing about true crime is a true crime viewer in the United States will be just as interested in a New Zealand case as an American case.”
Soon her audience started to build, she says, both on her YouTube channel and then on TikTok.
The success became overwhelming, she says, the true crime audience being “super harsh".
“If you are late to put content out, or if you mispronounce the name in good faith, like it's just an accident, especially if you're talking about a different country, if you mispronounce something despite your best efforts, or if they just feel that your take on it, or your angle, is just not quite right, then man, they will just come for you. It's so ruthless,” she says.
She was combining her day job in advertising with creating content after work, she says, but she wasn’t enjoying it.
“What is that saying? Sunk cost fallacy. And it felt like I was always just, I don't know, on the precipice of turning it into a career, even though I didn't actually want that.”
One case she was working on was the tipping point, she says.
“I wanted to create a series about it and started conversations with media companies about partnering with them to help me produce it.”
It was a very sensitive case, and she became uneasy about contacting people to interview them about “the worst thing that had ever happened to them in their life".
“It felt like exploitation, and I just couldn't do it. I couldn't do it anymore. I was like … what am I doing here?”
She realised that she had to be honest about her motivations for creating this kind of content, she says.
“Why was I doing this? It was to benefit myself. Honestly, like I was doing it in the hopes that it would help my own YouTube career go further. And that just didn't feel good to me.”
Now, Eastwood focuses her time and energy on a project called Sick Sad Lit, a space for dark and unusual book recommendations, cultural commentary, and personal essays.
It’s a project that sits more comfortably with her, she says.
“It's just so fulfilling. This could not be more opposite what I was doing. And it actually just feels good.”
