Heather Armstrong, an explosively well-liked net author and entrepreneur who, beneath the identify Dooce, was hailed because the queen of the so-called mommy bloggers for giving tens of millions of readers common intimate glimpses of her joys and challenges in parenthood and marriage, in addition to her harrowing struggles with despair, died on Tuesday at her house in Salt Lake City. She was 47.
Her loss of life was introduced on her Instagram channel. Pete Ashdown, her boyfriend, stated the trigger was suicide. He stated he had discovered her physique within the house.
Ms. Armstrong, a lapsed Mormon from Salt Lake City, rose to prominence on the daybreak of the non-public weblog craze of the early 2000s. Her baptism within the discipline got here after she graduated from Brigham Young University in 1997 and transferring to Los Angeles, the place she taught herself HTML code and took a job at a tech firm.
She began Dooce.com in 2001, christening it with the nickname she had earned after committing a typo for writing the phrase “dude” in an AOL Instant Messenger chat with a pals, based on considered one of her tales.
Early on, she mined her experiences as a tech drone for materials, firing off tart salvos in regards to the absurdities of start-up tradition within the swelling dot-com bubble, publishing, say, bro-ish pronouncements overheard at an organization Christmas social gathering. (“Ruben, dude, you can’t stand on the table. Or on the bar.”)
A 12 months later, her weblog candor bought her fired, an expertise that impressed a preferred web phrase, “Dooced,” referring to individuals who discover themselves scanning job listings after posting ill-advised feedback on-line. The time period even discovered its method onto “Jeopardy!”
At first, Ms. Armstrong felt guilt.
“I cried in my exit interview,” she recalled. “My boss, who served as the subject of some of my more vicious posts, sat across the table from me unable to look me in the face, she was so hurt. I had never felt like such a horrible human being, even though in my mind I thought that I was just being creative and funny.”
But that profession setback opened up huge alternatives for fortune and fame. In an period when numerous individuals, ladies specifically, have been beginning private blogs — typically only for the pleasure of family and friends — Ms. Armstrong glimpsed industrial prospects.
As the running a blog growth approached its zenith in 2009, Ms. Armstrong was a breakout star, showing on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and attracting 8.5 million readers a month whereas tapping a gusher of revenue off banner advertisements, sponsored posts, books, talking charges and different sources.
As famous in a 2011 profile in The New York Times Magazine by Lisa Belkin, Ms. Armstrong was the lone blogger featured that 12 months on the Forbes checklist of essentially the most influential ladies in media; she was ranked No. 26, one slot behind Tina Brown of The Daily Beast. The article quoted a gross sales consultant for Federated Media, the corporate that bought advertisements on her website, who referred to as Ms. Armstrong “one of our most successful bloggers,” including, “Our most successful bloggers can gross $1 million.”
A full obituary will seem quickly.
If you might be having ideas of suicide, name or textual content 988 to achieve the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/sources for a listing of extra sources.
Source: www.nytimes.com