From Mars

This spring, Jenny Hollander, a twenty-three-year-old Columbia Journalism School student, sent out her résumé for summer internships. “Where didn’t I apply?” Hollander, who is from the U.K., said recently. “BuzzFeed, Mashable, the Fiscal Times, a lot of very small county papers all over the U.S.; California Watch, which is an investigative thing in California; the L.A. Times; the Huffington Post—twice.” She was either rejected or ignored by all of them. Then she came across a notice, on a Columbia Listserv, for a “writing internship” at an unnamed startup. The job paid fifty dollars a day. “It was all a little bit cloak-and-dagger,” Hollander said. She knew nothing about the company, but she applied anyway, and was delighted when she was hired.

On her first day of work, instead of going to an office, Hollander arrived at a newly renovated four-story town house in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It had two kitchens, two living rooms, and a roof deck—all decorated in a funky flea-market style. The house was the headquarters of Bustle, a new online publication for women. There were four editors in their mid-twenties, and a gaggle of interns—college students or recent graduates, all women—sat around, typing on MacBooks. Many students have summer jobs that involve little more than fetching coffee and maintaining Twitter feeds, so Hollander was surprised when she was told to take out her laptop and start writing blog posts. “I called my housemate and was, like, ‘So I’m doing this job, and all I’m doing is sitting on sofas in this gorgeous house with a bunch of other girls, and we’re all writing together!’ ”

If you go to Bustle.com, you will find a sleekly designed Web site, with headlines that read like the result of a one-night stand between Us Weekly and U.S. News & World Report. Its loosely female-oriented articles cover topics ranging from evergreen style tips (“Eight Modern Ways to Wear a Hair Scarf”) to celebrity gossip (“Why We’re Concerned for Simon Cowell’s Unborn Son”), with a prominent dash of hard news (the top stories last week were about Syria). To a large degree, the articles consist of aggregation: a Bustle writer finds a piece of news that interests her—from the Times, or from a blog she likes—and summarizes it for Bustle’s readers, perhaps making its contents into a list, or collecting some related tweets. Bustle’s house style—to the extent that one exists—is brisk and easily digestible, if a little thin. Soon after she started writing for Bustle, Hollander developed a recurring feature called “This Week in Studies,” in which she recaps the results of scientific research, in slide-show form: “A stunning new study reveals that a quarter of people regret something that we posted on social media at some point: a drunk Tweet, a melancholy Facebook post. . . . Seriously: only a quarter regret these things?”

Bustle’s articles are modest, but the ambitions of its founder, a young Silicon Valley entrepreneur named Bryan Goldberg, are not. When I first spoke to him, early in the summer, he referred to Bustle as “the next great women’s publication.” He was in the process of raising an unusually large amount of pre-launch money—$6.5 million—from investors such as Time Warner Investments and 500 Startups. In six years, Goldberg told me, he hopes that Bustle will attract fifty million visitors each month and earn more than a hundred million dollars a year in advertising revenue, making it the “biggest and the most powerful women’s publication in the world.”

Goldberg, who is thirty, is not a traditional publisher: he speaks more admiringly of Elon Musk than of any Pulitzer Prize-winner. But he is not all bluff. Six years ago, at the age of twenty-four, he and a few friends started Bleacher Report, a sports Web site that, in 2012, they sold to Turner Broadcasting for more than two hundred million dollars. Bleacher Report’s success was a striking example of the new economics of media: when it began, its articles were written by a network of two thousand unpaid sports fans (critics have described the site as an example of “loser-generated content”), yet today it attracts twenty-two million unique visitors each month, putting it behind only Yahoo U.S. Sports and ESPN.com among non-league sports Web sites. Bleacher Report’s high traffic and low production costs have made it extremely profitable. Soon after acquiring Bleacher Report, Turner made it the source of sports news at CNN.com, where it replaced Sports Illustrated. This changing of the guard was a reminder of how quickly, in the Internet age, a cost-effective business plan can overtake one built on a reputation for quality. Goldberg points out that Bleacher Report is now likely worth more than the two hundred and fifty million dollars that Jeff Bezos recently paid for the Washington Post.

by Lizzie Widdicombe, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Pari Dukovic