HitFix

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

~ the last words ~

HitFix went live in December 2008, which was a bad month to start a media company and a decent month to start a small one. Jen Sargent had been a development executive at Reed Business Information. Gregory Ellwood had edited film coverage at the Los Angeles Times and at MSN. What they built was an entertainment news site for people who wanted the reporting without a gossip column bolted to the side of it.

The thing that made it work was hiring. Drew McWeeny came over from Ain't It Cool News, where he had spent a decade writing as Moriarty. Alan Sepinwall arrived from The Star-Ledger in April 2010 and brought the television recap with him as a form people would read the morning after an episode aired, which Slate later credited him with turning into the shape television criticism now takes. By the middle of 2010 the site was past a million unique readers a month. For an independent entertainment site with a staff you could count, that was a real number.

HitFix's whole run sits inside years when I was online constantly and reading English-language sites every day, so the distance here is not about access. It is about which corner of the web. American entertainment trade coverage was a room I never walked into, and the criticism coming out of it reached readers outside the US late and through links, usually well after whichever site had paid for it was folded into something else.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

The business model was the one every mid-2000s media startup ran on. Hire good writers, build traffic, sell display advertising against it. HitFix got further with it than most because it was small. A staff you can count keeps the cost base low enough that a million readers a month is a viable business rather than a rounding error, and it also means the writers are the product in a way readers can see. People came for a specific byline.

By 2014 the site had expanded past film and television into music and awards coverage, and Ellwood's awards reporting had become a fixture of the season. It was never the biggest entertainment site on the web, but it was consistently one that people inside the industry read.

~ what really happened ~

Woven Digital, the company behind Uproxx, bought HitFix on 19 April 2016. The logic was demographic. Uproxx had scale with young men and HitFix had credibility with people who cared about film and television criticism, and putting the two together made a bigger number to sell to advertisers.

Woven said the HitFix brand would continue. It continued for about seven months. Drew McWeeny left in September 2016. That November the site stopped being a site and became a redirect, so eight years of work published under one name was suddenly published under somebody else's. The corporate entity was dissolved in 2021, long after anyone had noticed.

~ the long tail ~

Uproxx was itself sold to Warner Music Group in 2018, so the thing HitFix had been absorbed into was absorbed again within two years. Sepinwall went to Uproxx briefly and then to Rolling Stone, where he is still filing recaps. McWeeny went independent. The writers outlived the site, which is the normal outcome and still the odd one, because for most of its life the site was how you found the writers.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »