When I first saw the mini-doc on the final days of teenager Zach Sobiech on the UpWorthy website in the spring of 2013, I immediately thought I had stumbled upon the next great website.
I wasn't the only one. In October 2013, the site was only 19 months old but was a top 50 website in Quantcast's rankings according to the New York Times.
Since then, UpWorthy has amassed 10 million likes on Facebook and inspired legacy media to launch their own UpWorthy-esque blogs.
The site was launched as hyper-selective curator. The Washington Post quoted their blog in December 2013 stating, "Our top curators comb through hundreds of videos and graphics a week, looking for the 5-7 that they’re confident are super-shareable," Upworthy explains. "That’s not a typo: We pay people full-time to curate 5-7 things a week."
That quote is a telling part of the story of UpWorthy. Their limitations as a site is the same as how they became so popular in the first place: their "super-sharable" nature."
The issue with UpWorthy and the many sites that have followed its general premise, is that sometimes the most important stories aren't super-sharable. A curator for UpWorthy views content by how worthy of a click an individual reader might find it. Their bloggers write in a similar fashion. As a journalist, I still find it ethically difficult to only cater my writing towards what I think will be shared.
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