Brijit

» see brijit.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Brijit did one thing. It took a piece of long-form journalism, something in the twelve-thousand-word range, and published an abstract of it at about a hundred words. The name is what happens when you say abridge out loud and then spell it for a domain registrar. It launched in October 2007 out of Washington DC, built by Jeremy Brosowsky, a publishing entrepreneur who got the idea in his living room in 2005 looking at a stack of magazines he had paid for and had not read.

The mechanism was the part people argued about. Anyone could write an abstract and submit it. Brijit published the ones that were good enough and paid the writer for them, which made it a freelance desk wearing the clothes of a crowd-sourced site. Readers rated the abstracts, so a bad summary got marked as a bad summary in public. It covered The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and it did not stop at print: a radio segment got the same hundred words as a magazine feature, which is how Brijit ended up abstracting the public radio show that would later run its obituary.

It worked well enough that Wired named it a top business trend of 2008 in March of that year, five months after launch. Brosowsky described the pitch as Yelp for reading: tap the crowd and find the five things in the pile worth an evening. Thousands of people read the abstracts. Nobody had yet been asked to pay for one.

The premise required a very specific household. You had to be subscribing to more English-language long-form print than you could get through, and feeling bad about the backlog. In 2008 I was 24, on a TTNet line in Ankara, and the thing I had too much of was open browser tabs, not paid subscriptions. The pile Brijit was built to solve did not exist on my coffee table, and the version of the problem I did have would not be named for another five years.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the notice ~

On 14 May 2008 the homepage was a working seventeen-kilobyte site. Three days later the same address served 1,279 bytes, titled Brijit is currently undergoing a change, and the body did not hide behind any of the usual language. "You've reached this page because, at the moment, Brijit is out of money and can no longer afford to bring you the world in 100 words. We're working hard to find a way forward for our service and hope to relaunch in the not-too-distant future."

Then the sentence that matters more than the apology, because it is the one with a number in it: "And to our Brijit writers: payments in full for all abstracts published through May 15 will be made next week." A site that ran out of cash announced its own payroll deadline in public and named the date it would honor. Below that came a link to the archive, described as "Brijit and our nearly 16,000 abstracts", which is the only count of the whole output anyone published.

~ the hiatus that stayed a hiatus ~

The blog at brijit.wordpress.com kept the story going for a little longer. On 26 May a post titled "Site's Back Up, New Abstract Is Coming" suggested the pause was temporary. By 18 June the same blog was describing what had happened as a hiatus that began "a little more than a month ago", which is the sentence where a shutdown stops pretending. The last post on that blog is dated 6 October 2009 and is titled "Watching the Magazine Industry Commit Suicide", written by a man whose own magazine-adjacent startup had been dead for seventeen months.

In December 2008 public radio came to collect. Brosowsky told Marketplace that the investors pulled and that he could not say whether the financial crisis did it. "It was awful. I mean there's nothing good about it, it's terrible. You've got this great idea and you're getting terrific feedback on it and I would chalk it up as an experience and just move on if I didn't miss the service myself so damn much." He said he was planning a second attempt called SummaryMachine.com. It never arrived.

~ what the domain says now ~

brijit.com answers 200 today and the title still reads Brijit, which is the kind of result that makes a liveness probe lie to you. The site is a Squarespace page from 2020 advertising boxes of food "direct from local woman-owned food businesses", signed "Brijit, an Agricity project", with a heading reading "Brijit No. 3 was delivered Monday 6 April." Agricity is Brosowsky's urban agriculture outfit. He kept the name through twelve years and one career change and put it on something you can actually eat.

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