Heather Armstrong, a wildly popular web writer and entrepreneur who went by the moniker Dooce, has been hailed as the queen of so-called mom bloggers for regularly providing millions of readers with intimate insights into the joys and challenges of parenthood and marriage depression and died Tuesday at her home in Salt Lake City. she was 47
Her death was announced on her Instagram channel. Pete Ashdown, her boyfriend, said the cause was suicide. He said he found her body in the house.
Ms. Armstrong, a late Salt Lake City Mormon, rose to fame at the start of the personal blog trend in the early 2000s. Her baptism in this field came after graduating from Brigham Young University in 1997 and moving to Los Angeles, where she taught herself HTML code and got a job at a technology company.
She founded Dooce.com in 2001 and christened it the nickname she earned after, according to one story, she made a typo while spelling the word “Dude” in an AOL Instant Messenger chat with friends.
Early on, she used her experiences as a tech drone as material, firing off scathing salvos about the absurdities of startup culture in the growing dot-com bubble and releasing fraternal remarks she heard at a company Christmas party, for example. (“Ruben, dude, you can’t stand on the table. Or on the bar.”)
A year later, she was fired for blogging openly, an experience that led to a popular Internet expression called “Dooced,” which refers to people browsing job postings after posting ill-advised comments online. The term even found its way into “Jeopardy!”
At first, Ms. Armstrong felt guilty.
“I cried at my exit interview,” she recalls. “My boss, who has been the subject of some of my more vicious posts, was sitting across the table from me and couldn’t look at my face, she was so hurt. I had never felt like such a horrible person, even though I thought I was just being creative and funny.”
But this professional setback opened up enormous opportunities for wealth and fame. At a time when countless people, especially women, were starting personal blogs – often just for the amusement of friends and family – Ms. Armstrong saw commercial opportunities.
As the blogging boom neared its peak in 2009, Ms. Armstrong was a breakthrough star. She appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, attracting 8.5 million monthly readers while also raking in a ton of revenue from banner ads, sponsored posts, books, speaking royalties, and other sources.
As noted in a 2011 profile by Lisa Belkin in The New York Times Magazine, Ms. Armstrong was the only blogger to make that year’s Forbes list of the most influential women in media; She came in at number 26, one spot behind The Daily Beast’s Tina Brown. The article quoted a sales rep from Federated Media, the company that sold ads on her website, as calling Ms. Armstrong “one of our most successful bloggers,” adding, “Our most successful bloggers can make $1 million.”
A full obituary will be forthcoming.
If you are having suicidal thoughts, call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.