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Heather Armstrong, an explosively fashionable internet author and entrepreneur who, along with her web site Dooce, was hailed because the queen of the so-called mommy bloggers for giving thousands and thousands of readers intimate glimpses of her joys and challenges in parenthood and marriage, in addition to of her harrowing struggles with melancholy, died on Tuesday at her dwelling in Salt Lake Metropolis. She was 47.
Her dying was introduced on her Instagram channel. Pete Ashdown, her longtime associate, stated the trigger was suicide. He stated he had discovered her physique within the dwelling.
Ms. Armstrong, a lapsed Mormon from Salt Lake Metropolis, 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 Younger College in 1997 and moved 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 writing the phrase “dude” in an AOL Instantaneous Messenger chat with pals, in accordance with certainly one of her tales.
Early on, she mined her experiences as a tech drone for materials, firing off tart salvos concerning the absurdities of start-up tradition within the swelling dot-com bubble, publishing, say, bro-ish pronouncements overheard at an organization Christmas celebration. (“Ruben, dude, you possibly can’t stand on the desk. Or on the bar.”)
A 12 months later, her weblog candor received 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 manner onto “Jeopardy!”
At first, Ms. Armstrong felt guilt.
“I cried in my exit interview,” she recalled. “My boss, who served as the topic of a few of my extra vicious posts, sat throughout the desk from me unable to look me within the face, she was so harm. I had by no means felt like such a horrible human being, although in my thoughts I believed that I used to be simply being inventive and humorous.”
However that profession setback opened up huge alternatives for fortune and fame. In an period when numerous individuals, girls particularly, had been beginning private blogs — typically only for the pleasure of family and friends — Ms. Armstrong glimpsed business prospects.
Because the running a blog growth approached its zenith in 2009, Ms. Armstrong was a breakout star, showing on “The Oprah Winfrey Present” and attracting 8.5 million readers a month whereas tapping a gusher of revenue off banner adverts, sponsored posts, books, talking charges and different sources. Quickly she was being broadly hailed as “the queen of the mommy bloggers.”
As famous in a 2011 profile in The New York Instances Journal by Lisa Belkin, Ms. Armstrong was the lone blogger featured that 12 months on the Forbes checklist of probably the most influential girls in media; she was ranked No. 26, one slot behind Tina Brown of The Day by day Beast. The article quoted a gross sales consultant for Federated Media, the corporate that offered adverts on her website, who known as Ms. Armstrong “certainly one of our most profitable bloggers,” including, “Our most profitable bloggers can gross $1 million.”
A full obituary will seem quickly.
If you’re having ideas of suicide, name or textual content 988 to succeed in the Nationwide Suicide Prevention Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/assets for a listing of extra assets.
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