Heather Armstrong, an explosively popular web writer and entrepreneur who, going by the name Dooce, has been hailed as the queen of so-called mommy bloggers for regularly giving millions of readers intimate glimpses of her joys and challenges in parenthood and marriage, as well as her poignant struggling with depression, died Tuesday at her home in Salt Lake City. She was 47.
Her death was announced on her Instagram channel. Pete Ashdown, her old partner, said suicide was the cause. He said he found her body in the house.
A retired Mormon from Salt Lake City, Mrs. Armstrong rose to prominence at the start of the personal blogging craze of the early 2000s. Her baptism in the field came after she graduated from Brigham Young University in 1997 and moved to Los Angeles, where she taught himself HTML code and took a job at a technology company.
She started Dooce.com in 2001 and christened it with the nickname she earned after making a typo writing the word “dude” in an AOL Instant Messenger chat with friends, according to one of her stories.
Early on, she used her experiences as a tech drone for material, firing sharp salvos about the absurdities of startup culture in the swelling dot-com bubble, and publishing, shall we say, bro-esque statements overheard at a Christmas party of a company. (“Ruben, dude, you can’t stand on the table. Or on the bar.”)
A year later, her candor on her blog got her fired, an experience that inspired a popular internet phrase, “Dooced,” referring to people who scan job openings after posting ill-advised comments online. The term even found its way into “Jeopardy!”
At first, Mrs. Armstrong felt guilty.
“I cried during my exit interview,” she recalls. “My boss, who has been the subject of some of my more vicious posts, sat across the table from me and couldn’t 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 I was just being creative and funny.”
But that career setback opened up huge opportunities for fortune and fame. In an era when countless people, especially women, started personal blogs—often just for the enjoyment of friends and family—Ms. Armstrong saw a glimpse of commercial opportunity.
As the blog boom neared its peak in 2009, Ms. Armstrong was a breakout star, appearing on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and drawing 8.5 million readers a month as she tapped a stream of revenue from banner ads, sponsored posts, books, speaking fees and other sources. Soon, she was widely hailed as “the queen of mommy bloggers.”
As noted in a 2011 profile in DailyExpertNews Magazine by Lisa Belkin, Ms. Armstrong was the only blogger to make that year’s Forbes list of the most influential women in media; she was ranked number 26, one slot behind Tina Brown of The Daily Beast. The article quoted a sales representative for Federated Media, the company that sold ads on its site, as calling Ms. Armstrong “one of our most successful bloggers,” adding, “Our most successful bloggers can gross $1 million.”
A full obituary will be published shortly.
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.