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.
One hot morning in June, I showed up at the Bustle headquarters, to attend an orientation meeting for the writers. Goldberg met me at the door. Despite having run a sports Web site, he does not look like an athlete. He is slightly plump, and he tends to wear baggy polo shirts, purchased in San Francisco, where, as he puts it, “the schlubbier you are, the more credibility you have.” With his puffy face and untrimmed hair, he resembles a giant six-year-old.
Goldberg left Bleacher Report in February, and has worked at a breakneck pace to build up his women’s publishing venture: by March, he’d raised a million dollars in initial seed money. He had also hired a Web development team and four editors, who built Bustle’s site in three months.
In May, shortly before Bustle’s writers were scheduled to start, Goldberg rented the town house and enlisted his aunt, a decorator, to furnish it in a style that she calls “eclectic, with a strong mid-century flavor.” Though the house is not far from Williamsburg’s scene-y Bedford Avenue, it has suburban touches. On the second floor, there is a kitchen/living room with a flat-screen TV (so that writers can review TV shows); one wall is decorated with forged-iron tools. Upstairs is another kitchen/living area, where writers and editors tend to gather, and which Goldberg’s aunt spruced up with a vintage globe, watercolor paintings, and a mod yellow couch from Macy’s. The top floor opens onto a roof deck, and it includes a room with a futon, usually occupied by the Web development team, which is all male. Until recently, Goldberg was living in a bedroom on the second floor—he sometimes rolled out of bed in the morning and wandered into meetings in shorts, a polo shirt, and black ankle socks.
The house—and the Web site—is an unlikely setting for Goldberg. “I am a dude,” he said. “I don’t have a lot of overlapping interests with most women my age. I’m really into history. I’m really into markets and finance.” (Wall St. Cheat Sheet is one of his favorite blogs.) “I don’t know a damn thing about beauty, but I don’t need to.” He’d turned over editorial control of the site to his writers and to their editors: Meredith Turits, Rachel Krantz, Kate Ward, and Alexandra Finkel—women in their twenties whom Goldberg recruited from Glamour, the Daily Beast, Hollywood.com, and Condé Nast. (More have since joined.) Goldberg told me they’d already proved his instincts correct by suggesting the site’s name—Bustle—which he loved. “A guy who’s successful, busy, cool, and popular—people would say he’s a real hustler,” he told me. “A woman who’s successful, busy, living in a city—maybe she’s a bustler!” He added, “It’s also a type of old-fashioned dress accessory. I did not know that. I know now.”
Goldberg wasn’t a reader of women’s publications before he started one, but he considers himself an expert in “markets and audiences.” Traditionally, women’s publishing—print—has been dominated by glossy magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Glamour, and Vogue, which have, in some cases, hundred-year-old histories, and still reap big profits. Over the years, a few alternative titles have sprung up, including Ms., in the seventies, and Sassy, which was founded in 1988 and featured articles like “Thirteen Reasons to Stop Dieting.” Gossip magazines, such as Us Weekly and InTouch, make money in the supermarket checkout line.
Online, a slew of women’s-interest blogs—such as Jezebel, which is owned by Gawker Media, and The Hairpin—have picked up the feminist mantle of providing counter-programming to the big glossies, while gossip blogs, such as omg!, which attracts forty-four million unique visitors per month, and Perez Hilton, draw large audiences. But, despite the cultural prominence of glossy magazines, many of them have a surprisingly small Internet presence. Goldberg decided that there is no female equivalent of ESPN.com, an advertiser-friendly Web site that appeals to just about all members of one sex. “If no one’s going to go out there and create the next great new women’s media property, then I’m going to do it,” he told me. “Why not me?”
For Bustle, going big means going wide. “So many publications launch with a thesis around the voice,” Goldberg continued. “If you read Jezebel, you know you’re going to find a voice that’s somewhat philosophical. If you read xoJane”—a Web site run by Jane Pratt, the founding editor of Sassy—“you’ll find a voice that’s unabashed. Vogue: superiority.”
Goldberg found the voice-driven model limiting, so he decided not to hire an editor-in-chief. Instead, Bustle’s editors—who have been given equity in the company—exert control over their individual sections. Krantz oversees News, where the articles often sound like they could have come straight from the A.P.; Turits oversees Lifestyle, where writers take a confessional tone. (“According to mirrors and a bunch of guys on Twitter, I am fat.”) Ward oversees Entertainment and serves as the site’s managing editor. She told me she joined Bustle because “Bryan is a proven success. I wanted to be part of something successful.”
For the most part, Bustle’s editorial purview will be determined by its writers: instead of enlisting a staff of seasoned professionals, as a glossy magazine might, Goldberg plans to use writers from the group of young women that is Bustle’s intended readership, those aged eighteen to thirty-four. He hopes that, by gradually hiring hundreds of these writers and asking them to “create the content that interests them,” the Web site will become “an accurate representation” of the larger demographic. Writers are paid, but only part-time rates. (Interns get fifty dollars a day, while more established freelancers receive a hundred.) Right now, Bustle’s staff cranks out sixty articles a day. Eventually, Goldberg hopes, they will produce “a thousand articles a day—a thousand relevant articles a day,” covering “every topic that young women care about—all their favorite shows, all their favorite celebrities, all their favorite fashion brands, every news story that’s relevant to them.” Goldberg’s vision—with its triumph of mathematical certainties over editorial art—reminded me of the infinite-monkey theorem: if you were to have monkeys randomly strike typewriters for an infinite amount of time, the proposition goes, they would eventually type the complete works of Shakespeare. If you assemble a sufficiently large and diverse group of young, female writers, they will eventually produce a Web site that is popular with young women.
Around noon, twenty-six writers and editors assembled in the second-floor living room. The scene resembled a dorm meeting at an exclusive college: the women, dressed in sandals and jeans, crowded onto couches and the floor. Someone had ordered Thai food for lunch, and take-out boxes were piled on the kitchen counter. Goldberg slumped at the end of the couch, with his hands behind his head. He was the only man in the room.
Ward ran the meeting. In jeans and a blazer, she had a casual but businesslike vibe. She asked all of the interns to say something interesting about themselves. Dale Neuringer, from the University of Edinburgh, said, “I’m twenty. I’m writing for the entertainment vertical.” Her interesting fact: “I have twenty-one piercings.” She pulled back her long hair to reveal an ear that was covered in silver hoop earrings. The room erupted in “Ooh”s. “I got, like, fifteen piercings done at once,” she said. “It was such a bad idea, but so awesome at the same time.”
Ward placed a laptop on the floor and connected a few interns remotely, through Google Hangout. One worked as a cat-sitter; another said she came from a family of bluegrass musicians. When it was Goldberg’s turn, he said, “Do I get skipped? No boys allowed! I’m Bryan. . . . Fun fact about me? I can say all the Presidents in order really fast.”
The writers and editors talked about their visions for the site. Turits said, “I often sit on my couch, and I watch MSNBC while painting my toenails. It didn’t feel like there was a Web site that felt like the Internet equivalent of watching MSNBC while painting my toenails.”
A writer named Kelsea Stahler said that she didn’t want Bustle’s writing to seem too “élitist.” She argued that some women’s sites contained too many overreaching literary references. “It drives me nuts,” she said. “Seriously? I’m reading about Justin Bieber’s monkey and you’re referencing Nietzsche?”
Goldberg mostly stayed quiet, but he agreed with a writer who said that she wanted to see more gender-neutral television coverage—a comment that reinforced a belief of his that Bustle should appeal to young women without “pandering.” “One thing we definitely didn’t want to do with this site is to have ‘women’ or ‘girls’ or ‘us’ in the name, or have, like, a sugary, candy sort of name,” he said. “We didn’t want pink everywhere.”
When the meeting was over, he was beaming. “It proves my theory,” he said. “Young people can do a lot more than old people think they can. You listen to these girls talk—some of them are twenty, twenty-one—and they understand this industry better than a lot of Wall Street media analysts.”
Diana Vreeland, the editor of Vogue in the nineteen-sixties, once described her personal philosophy by saying, “I believe, you see, in the dream.” Traditionally, women’s magazines have specialized in a top-down product: an aspirational vision of leisure and beauty for the masses to emulate, embodied by the highly paid (and often highborn) editors. Goldberg’s model, by contrast, is both low-cost and populist. He likes to characterize himself as the leader of a youth revolt, rather than as a capitalist overlord. “People are naturally skeptical,” he told me.
Goldberg ascribes his can-do attitude to his Silicon Valley background. He grew up in Los Altos, the son of a technology executive (his father worked at Atari and Quantum) and a homemaker, and he seems to have made the Bay Area’s ethos of disruption into his personal belief system. “New Yorkers have too much reverence for their institutions,” he told me. “A young banker absolutely worships Goldman Sachs. A young journalist is in complete awe of Condé Nast.” He continued, “In Silicon Valley, growing up, your parents approve of you saying, ‘Oh, I could do something way better than that.’ ”
The entrepreneurial bug didn’t bite until after college, at Middlebury. Goldberg, who had taken a consulting job at Deloitte, was sharing complaints with two middle-school friends, Dave Finocchio and David Nemetz, about ESPN and Sports Illustrated, which they felt stinted on coverage of Bay Area sports teams. According to Goldberg, the three found themselves saying, “Our friends know more about sports than these guys do.” Thus was born Bleacher Report: a Web site where sports fans write the articles. Goldberg, Finocchio, and Nemetz joined up with another middle-school friend, Alexander Freund, and started the company. In the fall of 2007, they raised a million dollars from Hillsven Capital.
As Goldberg describes it, Bleacher Report was designed to solve a logistical problem. He and his friends wanted to cover all the “teams and athletes that matter”—the three hundred or so teams, from colleges to the professional leagues, with half a million fans or more, as well as the athletes, like Tiger Woods, who had their own fan base. Goldberg said, “We basically looked at the situation and asked, How do you cover three hundred teams on a daily basis?” He switched into a sarcastic voice, which he reserves for impressions of traditionalist thinking: “The answer is not to have a newsroom in Times Square in some fancy office building with thousands of writers in it. The answer is to go find some sports fans who live and breathe their teams and have them write the articles.” They posted notices on Craigslist and message boards, looking for fans who wanted to become sportswriters; thousands did. Goldberg said, “It took off like a rocket ship.”
Bleacher Report’s founders created editorial systems using their own logic. Because they couldn’t pay writers for the first few years, they came up with a reward system of medals and points, based on factors such as how many readers a story attracts and how many comments it gets. (Hot Read medals are awarded for articles that attract at least a thousand readers.) They used search analytics to generate story ideas. For example, if Google showed that people were looking for news of LeBron James after an injury, they’d assign an article—or five—on James, making sure to put search terms such as “injury” and “Miami Heat” in the title (a process, universal in Web publishing, known as search-engine optimization). Provocative opinion pieces were encouraged, even if they contradicted one another. In a typical Bleacher Report scenario, one writer might write a piece with the headline “The Miami Heat Are the Greatest Dynasty Ever,” while another would argue that “The Miami Heat Are Not the Greatest Dynasty Ever.” By covering a topic from every angle, the site generated more clicks.
Bleacher Report’s articles quickly became ubiquitous—within a year of the site’s founding, if you were a sports fan, you had come across a Bleacher Report link. But the product was, for the most part, less than stellar. Encouraged to rack up page views, the Web site’s untrained writers churned out slide shows, “best of” lists, and pictures of sexy women only loosely related to sports. Recent popular articles on the site include “Sports Fashion Fails” and the “Best Handshake GIFs in Sports.” One article, “The 20 Most Boobtastic Athletes of All Time,” states, “Let’s face it—men like boobs.” Not exactly glittering prose, but, when it comes to covering local sports, Goldberg said, “we don’t need every writer to be David Brooks.”
By the time it was sold to Turner, Bleacher Report was making tens of millions of dollars a year. Brian Morrissey, the editor of Digiday, recently explained how publishers like Bleacher Report have managed to succeed by “gaming the Internet ad system.” Advertising on the Web is cheap: Bleacher Report charges roughly fifty dollars for every thousand people who see their most expensive type of ad, a “homepage takeover.” Meanwhile, Sports Illustrated, whose circulation is three million, charges almost four hundred thousand dollars for a full-page color ad. But, Morrissey said, “You make up for low ad rates by producing as many page views as possible at low costs.” A well-researched exposé, such as the one Sports Illustrated recently ran about N.C.A.A. violations by the Oklahoma State football team, may take many months of work from a highly paid reporter and editor. But, in the end, Morrissey said, “it yields the same revenue as a ‘25 Sexiest Female Athletes Who Can Kick Your Ass’ post, which costs, like, two hundred dollars.”
Among sophisticated sports fans, Bleacher Report has a lingering bad reputation. One day, at the Bustle town house, I got into a conversation with Goldberg’s Web product director, RJ Ciccaglione. He said that he was a fan of Grantland, a writerly site that is owned by ESPN and run by Bill Simmons. “I’m a big sports guy, but I never liked Bleacher Report,” he said. “The content sucked.”
With Bustle, Goldberg wanted to do things differently. He describes Bleacher Report’s poor writing quality as a rookie mistake: “We didn’t hire editors in the first year. Bleacher Report had thousands of writers out of the gate.” With Bustle, he said, at first, “I just want to have twenty-five really good ones.”
Another lesson he’d picked up was about the power of demographics. At Bleacher Report, Goldberg found himself in meetings with giant advertisers like Unilever. “They’d say, ‘Great, you have a cool sports Web site. Unfortunately, almost every brand in our portfolio is for women.’ ” He realized that a Web site’s ability to reliably deliver a demographic was key to its success. “One of the reasons why Bleacher Report is worth hundreds of millions of dollars is not just because it reaches a lot of people but because it reaches an overwhelmingly male audience,” he told me. Frequently, publications find their audience via subject matter: they cover sports to reach men, or beauty to reach women. With Bustle, Goldberg decided to reverse the process: start with a demographic in mind, and, as Bustle gains readers and writers, use “data and analytics” to determine what the audience wants.
To do this, Goldberg said, “I needed years of cash.” Over the summer, he embarked on his next round of fund-raising—five and a half million dollars, which he figured would cover three years of operations. One morning, he met with a potential investor, Mo Koyfman, of Spark Capital, at the restaurant Balthazar, in SoHo. Goldberg, who wore a baggy gray suit, seemed nervous. He pulled out a laptop and showed Koyfman a PowerPoint deck, which offered facts about female spending power (“Women control as much as 70% of household purchases”). A note in boldface read, “Nobody is attracting young women at scale.” Goldberg never claimed to be an expert on women, only on the mechanics of online publishing, but his business-oriented approach could lead him into awkward territory.
“What’s the content strategy?” Koyfman asked. “Talk to me about the positioning, the brand.”
“Bustle’s for modern women in their twenties,” Goldberg said. “Eighteen to thirty-four, but really in their twenties. It’s for modern women with busy life styles.”
“So you’re writing it for the Sheryl Sandbergs out there?” Koyfman asked.
“Well—for young women right now.”
“So let’s break this down into a little bit finer grain,” Koyfman said. “It’s women in their twenties and thirties? Professional?”
“Professional,” Goldberg said. “Hardworking. Great careers. Proud of their careers.”
“Some young moms, right?”
Goldberg nodded. “Some young moms.”
“Who are short on time, long on interest.”
Goldberg said, “And that’s the common thread between women in the professional world and stay-at-home moms. They’re very busy. There’s always bustle in their lives.”
Koyfman said, “How many in that audience, would you say?”
“Fifty to one hundred million. I’ll take the ones in the U.K. and Canada, too.”
“Is it fifty or a hundred?”
“I haven’t even counted, because once it’s over fifty million I know this is a big opportunity.”
Koyfman seemed unconvinced. He e-mailed me later, saying that, among other things, “it was just not clear to me that . . . Bustle had the right brand & content approach to be broadly appealing.” But Goldberg found other willing partners. Ted Maidenberg, of Social+Capital, which invested in Bustle, noted the success of Bleacher Report, and told me, “Bryan is the kind of person who’s going to do this three or four times over the course of his career.”
One day, I stopped by the Bustle headquarters and found the house half empty: the Internet connection was down. The writers and editors had migrated to a coffee shop around the corner. Jenny Hollander was working on a slide show inspired by controversial jokes about rape on Facebook. (“Are all posts on Facebook protected under the First Amendment?”) Alexandra Finkel, an editor, was going through a file of applications from potential interns, who came from schools such as Oxford, Barnard, and the University of Chicago. (Goldberg told me, “We have several Ivy League writers out of the gate.”)
One of the main criticisms of Bleacher Report’s business model was that Goldberg’s talk of “empowering” young writers was really a way to justify their exploitation. This may be true, but I had a hard time finding anyone among Bustle’s intern workforce who seemed concerned about it. Michelle King, a senior at the New School, was working on a slide show called “Do You Forgive John Galliano?” (She had walked around Williamsburg boutiques, asking people about the designer’s anti-Semitic rant.) She told me that she had done a slew of internships—at Refinery29, Glamour, Her Campus, Bullett, and Seventeen—where she’d been paid little or nothing. Until Bustle, she said, “I really haven’t been able to write about the topics that I want with fashion and beauty.” He was thrilled with King’s article. “Sports has a scandal happen,” he said, “like someone uses steroids, and it changes people’s opinion. And then in fashion we have a major designer who did something scandalous!”
Goldberg had been pitching in with his own editorial research, by talking to “hundreds and hundreds” of young women. He’d talk to anyone: “Friends. Friends of friends. I’m not shy. I’m not afraid to talk to the girl who’s working behind the counter at a salon. I’m not afraid to talk to the hostess at the restaurant. I would ask women at bars, ‘What Web sites do you read?’ ”
When Goldberg talks about his entry into women’s publishing, he can bring to mind an episode of “The Simpsons,” in which Homer, discovering that bacon, ham, and pork chops all come from pigs, calls them a “wonderful, magical animal.” He had a riff that he was delivering to anyone who asked: “If you told nine guys to sit down in a waiting room in a dental office, they’ll probably start talking about sports. For women, there’s twenty things it could be. ‘I like your earrings. Where did you get them?’ Or someone sees a People magazine and talks about Amanda Bynes. It could be—someone mentions Zumba, and ‘Oh, I’ve been thinking of doing that.’ ” Books are a major category on Bustle. “Men, to the best of my knowledge, don’t even read,” Goldberg said. “When’s the last time you heard a man say, ‘I’ve been reading this great book, you’d really like it’? My girlfriend always tells me about these books she’s reading, and I don’t even see her reading the book! Where does this book live?” (Goldberg met his girlfriend, a health writer, at a hotel where he was staying with friends; she was in the room next door, and she asked him to keep the noise down.)
He delivered this particular speech to Jane Pratt, formerly of Sassy and now of xoJane. Goldberg met with her in a conference room at the midtown offices of Say Media, her publisher, to ask for advice. Pratt seemed amused. “Are you reading a book right now?” she asked.
“No!” Goldberg said.
“I am. There you go.”
Pratt was encouraging, especially after hearing about the sixty articles that Bustle was producing each day. “What the—! That is crazy!” she said. “We kill ourselves to do fifteen.”
Not everyone was optimistic, though. Troy Young, of Hearst Media, which publishes Cosmopolitan, quizzed Goldberg about his decision not to hire an editor-in-chief. “Is it you?” he asked. “Are you the editor of a woman’s magazine?”
Back at Bustle’s headquarters, the staff was gathering for a barbecue. There were nacho chips, and asparagus for the grill, and Goldberg had bought drinks. Working at Bustle had taught him the virtues of healthy living. “I’ve probably consumed more kale in the last three months than I’ve consumed in my entire life,” he told me. He berated the site’s Web engineers for not ordering enough veggie and turkey burgers: “Four! We have four veggie burgers for a company of twenty women!”
He wandered up to the roof deck, where a group of about fifteen interns and editors were sipping wine from plastic cups and discussing workout music.
“I love Taylor Swift,” Michelle King said. “Unabashed.”
Goldberg stood at the perimeter, holding a growler of beer. “It’s hard to break into a circle of fifteen girls,” he said. Finally, he cleared his throat. “I should give a one-minute speech to thank everyone,” he said. “First of all, thank you for taking a chance on a completely awkwardly veiled internship post from a to-be-named company. . . . I know it seems a little bit daunting, but if we just do our thing now, and do our thing tomorrow, and next week and next year, we will win!”
The interns applauded. Goldberg sat down and began eating a turkey burger. He grimaced. “I forgot how much worse turkey burgers are than regular burgers. They’re significantly inferior.”
The interns had begun discussing a Lifetime movie, “Prosecuting Casey Anthony,” starring Rob Lowe. Goldberg was not familiar with the movie, or, really, with Lifetime, so he peppered them with questions:
“Is that what Lifetime does? Make TV movies for women?”
“Yes!” several of the interns said.
“Who won the Casey Anthony trial again?”
“Casey Anthony won!”
“Which one was she again?”
“She was the one who murdered her two-year-old!”
“Oh, yeah,” Goldberg said. “That was bad. . . . Who is Drew Peterson?” It went on like this for a few minutes. Goldberg asked a dance critic, “How do you criticize dance? What’s good dance and what’s bad dance? Because, for people who don’t dance well, it’s all pretty good. You’re pretty impressed by all of it.”
Eventually, one of the writers, Kelsea Stahler, turned to Goldberg and brought up the introductory meeting. She said, “You were talking about having no pink on the Web site, and I was wearing pink sandals, pink jeans, and a pink headband. . . . I felt like the most awkward person in the room.”
Goldberg seemed confused. “You remember what you were wearing three days ago?” he asked, and shook his head. “Just so you know, most guys don’t remember what they’re wearing right now.”
By August, Bustle was up and running, but it was flying under the radar: Goldberg doesn’t believe in launch parties. After completing his fund-raising, however, he decided that it was time to let the world know what he’d been up to. He writes a column for the tech Web site PandoDaily, where he has occasionally stirred up controversy with assertions like “Losers exist. Don’t hire them.” On August 13th, he wrote a blog post with the headline “I’ve raised $6.5 million to build and grow my new company: Bustle.com.”
When Goldberg is making a business pitch, his preferred rhetorical strategy is the comic rant: he makes his argument by ridiculing the presumed logic of his competitors and by marvelling at the simplicity and obviousness of his own position. This was, more or less, the tone he took in his blog post. Goldberg made a case for Bustle’s editorial strategy by asking some sarcastic questions of women’s magazines:
This was followed by a Q. & A. with himself, in which he argued with imagined skeptics—“Is this a feminist publication? You’re damn right this is a feminist publication.” At one point, he touted Bustle’s news coverage again, writing, “Yes, we believe that a partner-track attorney can be passionate about world affairs and celebrity gossip. On the same day. During the same coffee break. And there is nothing wrong with that. Welcome to the year 2013.”
To many readers, it sounded more like 2007—when Jezebel was launched—or even 1971, the beginning of Ms. Recently, the blogosphere coined a new term, “mansplaining,” which describes, according to Urbandictionary.com, a tone that men adopt when talking to women, characterized by “condescending, inaccurate explanations delivered with rock solid confidence of rightness.” With the publication of his blog post, Goldberg became its poster child—and, in a day, he and Bustle went from obscurity to infamy. The journalist Rachel Sklar wrote in the comments, “Congratulations for being the first person to realize that women are interested in foreign news AND makeup tips!” There were jokes on Twitter about Bustle’s name (“The Bustle. The Corset. The Foot-Binder. The Flaming Stake”). Slate published a parody article titled “Man Creates Very First Website for Women Ever.” (A few men came to Goldberg’s defense; one wrote, unhelpfully, “All you women are acting like crabs in a barrel.”)
While most of the outrage focussed on Goldberg’s tone (at one point, he claimed that “knowing the difference between mascara, concealer, and eye-liner is not my job”), his critics also attacked his business plan, arguing that his visions of producing a huge Web site were incompatible with his stated goal of producing “smart” content for young women. In a blog post titled “How Not to Launch a Site for Women,” Elizabeth Spiers, the founding editor of Gawker and a former editor of the New York Observer, wrote that the traffic numbers he was talking about—tens of million of readers—were achieved only by portals, such as Yahoo.com, and aggregators. “The only way that will ever work is if you . . . deluge the Internet with a tsunami of mediocre content that is so voluminous that it cannot be ignored, at least by search engines,” she wrote. “Which, to be fair, is sort of what you did with Bleacher Report.”
The next day, Goldberg wrote another blog post: an apology to women everywhere. It began, “I messed up,” and confessed to what he called “pandering” (a word that Goldberg seems to equate with “patronizing”) and having “over-simplified the editorial landscape.” When I spoke to him shortly afterward, he told me that he had just pulled an all-nighter.
Rachel Krantz, Bustle’s news editor, said that the fallout from Goldberg’s post had been “tough” on the writing staff: she and her fellow-editors had to institute “Twitter breaks,” to keep their interns from going down self-flagellating rabbit holes. She wished that Goldberg had run the announcement past the staff: “We would have edited out that makeup line.” She added, “I think what was missed was a clear portrayal of the fact that he is not the person behind this site. . . . All the content is driven by women.”
Goldberg regretted the tone of his announcement, but the firestorm that greeted his comments had not persuaded him to change his business strategy. Of Spiers’s critique, he said, “She questions whether I can build a Web site that reaches tens of millions of people each month? I’ve already done that. I did it when I was twenty-four years old.”
Bustle isn’t going away anytime soon. Goldberg still has his funding, which he plans to use, during the next three years, to sign “tens of thousands of dollars’ ” worth of checks each month to young, female writers. “What a lot of people in media, especially in New York, don’t get is that, if you want to reach tens of millions of people, you’ve got to approach it with an eye towards every single American,” he told me. He pointed out that traffic had doubled since his announcement—from around seven thousand visits per day to more than fourteen thousand. But he admitted that, since the monthly goal is fifty million, “that’s not saying much.” “In six months, we’re going to look at what parts of America we are not reaching,” he said. “We’re going to see what kind of content has managed to reach that region of America, and we’re going to create more content like that.”
In the end, Goldberg decided, the mistake of his launch announcement had been an “audience problem”: he’d aimed the announcement at “venture investors and advertising executives,” he said, but “it reached an audience of writers”—a group with different sensibilities. He told me that he wished he’d spent time building relationships with what he called “the feminist community.” “It got me thinking,” he said. “Honestly, nothing would have been more helpful here than for some highly regarded feminist writers to say, ‘Bryan’s a good person.’ ” ♦