‘We're just three dudes that made a documentary that blew up’
Sunday, 5 July 2026
Stewart Sowman-Lund’s media column, The Sunday Report - dissecting talking points from NZ media, entertainment and pop culture - appears weekly on Sundays on thepost.co.nz and in the Sunday Star-Times.
ANALYSIS: If you engage with the media on any level or spend your spare time doom-scrolling on social media, you almost certainly came across the story of NZ Muscle.
It was everywhere in the last two weeks. There were reports across various mainstream media outlets, including that the company had recalled creatine products that may have contained an undeclared allergen, along with claims about labelling and food handling standards.
If you engaged with the story on a traditional news platform, you may have assumed it originated in a newsroom.
But in reality, it was broken by a content creation platform called Kino House that launched a 40-minute documentary on YouTube under the name Kino House Investigates. The video now has over 300,000 views, just on YouTube. The creators believe that across social media their investigation has had closer to 4 million views - numbers that would make any newsroom deeply envious.
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It’s a fascinating saga and one that speaks to how the media is evolving. This was a highly produced piece of investigative journalism, developed by non-journalists and presented for the social media age.
But likely because it originated on the internet, few mainstream reports name Kino House in their own stories. Some stories vaguely acknowledged that the claims first circulated on YouTube.
Speaking to the Sunday Star-Times, Kino House Investigates’ Jordan Federici and Cameron Boot - two of the three behind the original video - say they were surprised at just how viral their documentary had gone.
“We dropped [it] at like 7am on a Saturday morning after not sleeping for like two days … and we woke up in the afternoon and it was going crazy. We had [messages] from various people in the media. It definitely was not our expectation in the beginning,” Boot tells the Star-Times.
“It was quite a surreal feeling when we're all sitting around … like, what on earth is going on now? Monday's rolling around, and we've got people coming in with TV cameras and stuff to interview us.”
While the pair describe the video as a documentary, they do not consider themselves journalists. They admit their investigation likely encountered less “red tape” than it would have in a traditional newsroom. For example, the creators relied solely on belief in their evidence rather than running the documentary by a lawyer first - as an investigation of this type would have been in a newsroom (they did, however, seek rights of reply and say none of the claims made were “baseless”).
Federici says they just wanted to “tell a story”.
Boot says it even more bluntly: “We're just three dudes that kind of made a documentary that somehow blew up.”
Admittedly, the creators did have insider insight into the industry they were exposing. Boot works in the supplement industry and has his own company. He does not consider this a conflict of interest, though it would be seen that way in a traditional newsroom. Federici used to work at an NZ Muscle gym, making the investigation in some ways closer to whistle-blowing than traditional journalism.
In a pre-internet era, he probably would have approached a journalist to investigate the story rather than telling it himself.
But that’s not how the internet works. The story exploded. The pair believe NZ Muscle underestimated the power of social media, which Federici says is a “very old way of thinking”.
He continues: “It's a very dated mindset to think that the internet or social media is a separate thing from something that might be in the newspaper. They're both going to affect people's perspective of you and your brand just as much, if not more, with social media being way more relevant these days.”
In the past week, Federici says his Instagram has had over 2 million views.
“I think it's a very risky approach for businesses to be like, ‘it's just going to stay isolated on Instagram’ and expect it to not spread to TikTok or Facebook. It's one of the reasons why we wanted to do the documentary and post it on social media. We understand the power of social media.”
The saga has echoes of the recent story involving fashion brand Huffer that we’ve previously examined in this column. While the individual at the centre of those claims may not have produced a 40-minute documentary airing his allegations, he too managed to break a story that was then widely picked up by mainstream media outlets.
Similarly, it felt as though Huffer was largely dismissive of the claims being made due to them stemming from a disgruntled person on social media (of course, it soon became a lot bigger than that).
Federici believes NZ Muscle was not anticipating the public response.
“It's crazy that businesses will see … the power of influencers for making sales or influencing a positive change to their brand image, but for some reason they can't view the inverse of that, which is the potential brand damage … if those influencers spoke something negative about the brand, because it's exactly the same,” he says.
“They understand the upside, but it's weird that they don't understand the downside.”
The top comment on the YouTube video compares the documentary to a now-cancelled consumer affairs programme. “Close enough. Welcome back Fair Go,” it reads.
But both Federici and Boot express scepticism about mainstream media - and say they don’t always trust it. “I think there's a lot of agendas, and not just that - even if the reporters want to report on something as best they see, there's so much red tape that stops them,” says Federici.
“I can't remember the last time I bought a paper.”
Federici and Boot say they’re planning further documentaries, possibly more “exploratory” than investigative. “I would say that we're all relatively righteous people,” says Boot. “We always care about doing the right thing for people.”
Have you got a media story, tidbit, gossip or pitch? Get in touch with me at stewart.sowmanlund@thepost.co.nz
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