Upworthy

Yeah.

Unfortunately, many people come to me after they've hired a slick salesman on the cheap, maybe from a site like Upworthy, who overpromised and underdelivered.

As a

result, their page got taken down.

It wasn't until 2017 after the Hillary and Trump election when I felt like the world was the most divided it had ever been at that point.

And at the time, there was all these great media companies, BuzzFeed and Vice and Upworthy.

They were all thriving.

But I really felt like there was an opportunity for us to create content or a media company that was about discussion, about empathy, about dialogue.

And people would say, oh, a lot of that heart and that ethos was part of Upworthy.

And I said, I totally agree.

But I felt like Upworthy was for my mom and my grandma.

And I wanted to make content that would resonate with young people, but not in this like saccharine type of way, but in a way that what we call a jubilee is like, how do you create chocolate covered broccoli? So both incredibly entertaining, interesting to watch, but also there is a ethos and a point to it.

Oh, this was amazing to read about.

An article in Upworthy highlights how the country of Denmark is staging a massive nationwide rebellion against the digital classroom.

Yeah, they looked at the exact same OECD data we just discussed.

They realized their students were slipping behind in reading and math, and they took drastic action.

That's really good.

And that, that, I'm gonna put that in my back pocket because when I'm not doing this, I'm the deputy editor of a website, uh, Upworthy.

Mm-hmm.

And uh, my writers will come to me with ideas and, you know, I have to unfortunately quite often say, "No, let's not write about that.

You know, I, like, did the things.

I worked at Upworthy, if you all remember that.

It was, like, this viral news factory [laughs].

And then I worked at Wirecutter, which was then acquired by The New York Times.

Thank you.

So Illuminate the Dark went up on Upworthy.

And Breath and Sound was up.

fucking everywhere, right? And so we were just like, upping the ante, upping the ante, upping the ante.

And I've written over like 8,000 articles that have appeared online.

So I went into ChatGPT and I said, okay, can you take this article I found elsewhere? And I said, could you write it in the style of Todd Perry from Upworthy? And then the thing turned out something wasn't as good as me, mind you.

Of course not.

Of course not.

The peak visibility era was 2013 to 2015.

BuzzFeed, Upworthy, Viral Nova.

Upworthy in particular built an entire media company on A-B testing headlines until they found the curiosity gap that maximized clicks.

This kid just died.

What he left behind is wondrous.

That was the template.

It became so ubiquitous that it spawned a parody genre.

People would write Upworthy-style headlines about mundane things.

I like it.

It's called Upworthy and it was about Mark Twain.

Mark Twain.

He's iconic.

We talked about it.

But speaking of bitching, I wrote an article for Upworthy about this, like, uh, newspaper ad for the first fall, uh, season of, uh, the WB in 1995, and it contains a bunch of sitcoms, i- including one that I was surprised I had never heard of, because it has Jason Bateman in it.

And I'm like, "I would, I think I would know this." And, uh, my husband's like, "Well, it was a wild time." [laughs] And you know, I, I think in '95 I wa- I didn't even ...

I may not have lived in a place that had a WB affiliate, and I think that's also part of it.