Bitesize BKK's Niki on Why She's Not a 'Real' Journalist

Episode 126 of Students Incorporated sits down with Niki, founder of the Bangkok news platform Bitesize BKK, who has spent nearly six years building a trusted media brand while insisting she isn't really a journalist at all. The episode also carries part eight of the show's serial mystery, "The Mystery of St. Augustine," which ends with a gun going off in a fort's gift shop hallway.

Two Degrees, No Newsroom

Niki's résumé reads nothing like a traditional journalism track. She studied politics and history as an undergraduate at the University of Exeter, then went back to London for a master's in politics and communications at the London School of Economics. From there she took a job as a copywriter at a Bangkok ad agency, lasted ten months, and left because writing to someone else's brief felt "a little bit boring." She pivoted into tech next, joining an e-commerce enabler serving Southeast Asia right as the Lazada and Shopee boom was taking off in Bangkok, then moved into tech PR, then spent a few years as a venture capital analyst at Siam Commercial Bank. Around 28, she quit to start Bitesize BKK.

"I would never refer to myself as a journalist," she said, "because I think a traditional journalist would have a lot of skill sets that I don't. And I have a lot of skill sets that they may not need to use in their day-to-day."

A Gap She Felt Personally

The idea predates the brand by a year — Niki traces it to the period just before COVID, when she was reading Western email newsletters like the Skimm and Morning Brew and noticing nothing like them existed for Bangkok's English-reading younger generation. "I would sit and talk to colleagues or friends, and they'd be like, what's going on here? Like, I don't get it," she said. Bitesize BKK started as a personal project to fill a gap she felt herself, aimed at readers 25 to 35. The audience assumption she pushes back on hardest: people expect the platform is built for expats. It isn't. The majority of her readership is Thai.

Betting on Instagram Over Her Own Domain

Niki ran a parallel experiment early on, building out a Mailchimp email list on the theory that a platform shouldn't depend on a social network it doesn't own. The audience didn't follow. She also ran Facebook alongside Instagram for a stretch — Facebook remains one of the most-used platforms among creators and thought leaders in Thailand generally, but the readers who showed up there skewed older and read in Thai, not the demographic Bitesize BKK was built for. She dropped both and put everything into Instagram, where the brand has now run for six years. "It's like launching a clothes shop in the mall that no one goes through," she said of chasing a platform her audience wasn't actually using. "What's the point?"

Fact-Checking With an AI Assist

Bitesize BKK doesn't break news — Niki describes her process as curating and rewriting stories already reported elsewhere, which puts the weight on getting the sourcing right. She pulls data points and quotes only from outlets she considers reputable — the Bangkok Post and the Nation domestically, Bloomberg or the New York Times internationally — and double-checks before publishing. When a topic is outside her depth, she said she turns to Claude to break it down before she writes about it; she gave Thailand's energy-policy exposure to the ongoing Middle East conflict as a live example she was working through at the time of the interview. Working social-first cuts the other way too: there's no paywall to hide behind, corrections happen in real time, and a wrong percentage or a disputed framing draws immediate pushback in the comments.

The Numbers Behind the Burnout

The episode's headline segment, delivered before the interview, laid out why a platform like Bitesize BKK has an opening in the first place. Pew Research Center's 2026 News Habits Report found TikTok has overtaken YouTube and Facebook as Gen Z's top news source, with 43% of social media users under 30 getting daily news there — mostly from independent creators, not established outlets. A separate Thailand Media Landscape 2026 report found 100% of major Thai media organizations surveyed have folded AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini into daily workflows, even as the Reuters Institute found 54% of audiences uncomfortable with news produced primarily by machines. UNESCO's 2026 World Press Freedom report added the bleakest number: in some regions, over 70% of people say they actively avoid the news because it's too negative or overwhelming. The quote of the day framed the stakes in George Orwell's words: "Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations."

Read By Choice

Asked what she'd tell students heading into the workforce, Niki's answer was blunt: stay curious, and never read from a single source. She pointed out that even her lifestyle-writing clients have pushed her to learn things she wouldn't otherwise — she took up tennis after clients wanted her to cover padel and tennis courts, just to understand why the trend was catching on. "The writing part is easy," she said. "It's the thought process behind it that's so important. You cannot be a good writer if you don't think well."

Part 8: What's Under the Fort

The story segment continues straight from last episode's discovery that a sunken ship, possibly one of Sir Francis Drake's, may be entombed beneath Castillo de San Marcos, and from the news that researcher Sarah has died. Shaken but needing to do something, Cece agrees to meet Professor Hawthorne at the fort that night rather than go home. Fort facilities director Chris Lawson lets them into the restricted lower chamber, where centuries-old backfill has turned to mud and water beneath the southeast corner. Wading in, Cece steps on something solid — a flat, tar-covered plank too wide to be old scaffolding. She scrapes off a sample with Chris's pocketknife, and the three agree to keep the find quiet until it can be verified.

Unseen, two operatives working for a mercenary group called "the table" — referred to only as Chair 4 and Chair 5 — have broken into the fort's gift shop to trail them, tripping a silent alarm on the way. As Hawthorne, Cece, and Chris try to leave through the gift shop hallway, Chair 4 corners Hawthorne and presses a gun to his forehead, demanding to know what the detective knows and what they found in the chamber below. Hawthorne is mid-answer when Chair 5 pushes past his partner, raises his gun, and fires twice.