Headline Newds is hijacking the news agenda

Megan Prescott will be familiar to many across the UK from her time as a child actress, when she played Katie Fitch (of “I’m fucking Katie Fitch” fame) in the third and fourth seasons of Channel 4’s Skins: the unfiltered look at indie sleaze era teenage debauchery in Bristol, which permanently altered millennials’ brain chemistry.

In the years after her time on the show, she continued exploring her creative talents as an actor while also pivoting into podcasting, writing and theatre-making: her show Really Good Exposure was a 2025 Fringe hit, then transferred to London’s Soho Theatre. Simultaneously, she has become a prominent OnlyFans creator — with her personal journey in adult content informing the plot of Really Good Exposure — and has stepped into sex workers’ rights advocacy, serving as Chair of the Board of Trustees of the charity National Ugly Mugs.

Prescott is continually working on new ways to evolve the conversation around sex work, connecting it to wider movements for justice, and has most recently teamed up with Yellow Dot Studios — the non-profit studio led by Adam McKay, the filmmaker best known for Don’t Look Up and The Big Short — to produce Headline Newds1: an online series exploring a new way of talking about climate change.

With a creative team comprising Prescott, filmmaker and OnlyFans creator Bree Esrig, and climate narrative strategist Jessica Riches, the USP is simple: using the mass appeal of erotic content in order to educate about the dangers of unchecked pollution and to encourage viewers to believe that another, more climate-friendly future, is possible.

Starring in the series alongside Prescott and Esrig are IRL sex workers Sabrina Jade, Kat Baker, Rebecca Crow, Ivy Maddox, Eva Oh and Lara Knox. The performers each helm their own episode, exploring topics like “oil kink” and “the sun is daddy”, in video content that lives across YouTube, Instagram and OnlyFans (the only digital location where the content can air in full, without censorship).

Below, Prescott was kind enough to speak to PULP about how Headline Newds is changing the face of climate justice education.

Okay, so, the very origin of Headline Newds is me meeting Jessica Riches, and our collaborator, Bree Esrig, who is a content creator extraordinaire. We all got to know each other in the past couple of years.

Jess is a filmmaker and a narrative strategist who specialises in communicating existential risk, so obviously climate change is very much on her radar. Jess then met someone from Yellow Dot, who are Adam McKay’s nonprofit media organisation, at a film festival, and got chatting to them. Have you seen The Big Short?

So you know the scene with Margot Robbie in the bath, explaining subprime mortgages?

We were like, okay, so this holds people’s attention. If you don’t already care about them, subprime mortgages could be quite boring. You wouldn’t necessarily look that up and try and find out about them if Margot Robbie wasn’t talking to you in the bath about it.

That spurred on the initial idea for Headline Newds: we noticed that on the far-Right, they find media personalities to speak and fuel the zeitgeist about their kind of narratives. We realised that the other side [the political Left] are not doing enough of this, and we need to think outside of the box.

“In the Venn diagram of sex workers and people that care about climate issues, there’s quite a big overlap”

It’s all well and good to do traditional messaging and marketing strategies, but it’s a climate crisis: things aren’t happening fast enough. We realised that we needed to really rock the boat to get people listening.

Me, Bree and now Jess are all on OnlyFans. Bree and I have been on there for years and years, and Jess just started. I’ve noticed, at least in my experience of sex work, that people talk to sex workers and listen to sex workers in a way that is different to any other social situation.

We were just like, let’s try it; let’s put something out there with really hot women talking about serious messaging. We knew sex sells and we knew that anything to do with OnlyFans gets PR attention and people write about it, often in a negative way. We’re really trying, however, to do something really positive and get people to listen to us.

Yellow Dot were really excited about the idea, and they commissioned eight episodes. This meant we could speak to the network of brilliant sex workers that we know, and get some really brilliant collaborators on board. People don’t treat sex workers with the respect that they deserve all the time, but the power that they have is enormous.

We reached out to sex workers and creators that I know personally, or who I have worked with before, and we just pitched the idea.

In the Venn diagram of sex workers and people that care about climate issues, there’s quite a big overlap. We found it really easy to find sex workers that were up for doing climate change messaging.

Luckily, we were able to pay people fairly, give people credits and get amazing performers. We managed to get people in all different fields of sex work, and we’re hoping in the future that we can extend that even more and scale it even further.

The response has been overwhelmingly positive. There has been some negative stuff, which we were prepared for — people are always ready to slag off sex workers — but the message has carried. The article that The Guardian did on Headline Newds was one of the most-read articles of theirs for a couple of days, which was amazing.

We have an amazing PR team at GingerBread Agency who understand the nuances of sex work. They did my podcast and my one-woman show at Soho Theatre, so I knew that we had a good team who knew how to position the message.

We didn’t want to say that men who care about OnlyFans don’t care about climate change, so we’re going to get them to, because that’s not true. We did know, however, that if we got really hot adult creators talking about climate change, it would take off. It’s very shareable, and the reach has been crazy, especially considering probably all of our creators are shadowbanned in some way. The fact that we still got the amount of views and reach we did really goes to show how amazing these performers are, and how much we should stop censoring them and underestimating them.

“The reach has been crazy, especially considering probably all of our creators are shadowbanned in some way”

With people in general, their disposition about sex work is pretty gross most of the time.

I’ve had a very, very privileged experience of sex work. I’ve only ever done stripping and OnlyFans, but I’ve had the privilege of working with all different types of sex workers, and have seen the stigma and discrimination that they receive.

As the Chair of the Board for National Ugly Mugs, I’ve seen how, even [within the charity sector], sex workers are discriminated against and not included in important conversations about sex work. It really annoys me that people underestimate sex workers.

I hope that people’s preconceived ideas about who sex workers are have been challenged a little bit. Sex workers are not a monolith, there are all different types of sex workers, there are all different types of people in sex work. I hope we got to represent that, like, ‘Hey, we care about the planet, maybe more than you! Maybe you should take a leaf out of our book…’

But who knows? People have some weird views about sex work.

FYI: I publish a free Substack essay, feature or interview every week, generally Monday 8am UK time.

I’m Megan (they/them): a Scottish writer specialising in the erotic. I’ve been running my Substack, PULP, for around a year but I’ve been writing professionally for quite a bit longer. My bylines include British GQ, CNN, British Vogue, The Guardian, etc.

If you like my work, you can tip a one-off payment of £4 here.

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