HitFix

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  HitFix launched in December 2008 with a premise that sounds simple in hindsight: what if there were a serious entertainment site aimed at people who wanted more than celebrity gossip but less than the dry trade press? The two founders, Jen Sargent and Gregory Ellwood, believed that gap was real and underserved. By the middle of 2010, more than a million unique readers a month were proving them right. What drew those readers in, who built the site, and how did a scrappy startup end up folded into one of the web's larger entertainment properties? Those are the threads this documentary follows.

• 2. The Gap They Spotted

  ›

  Jen Sargent came out of Reed Business Information, where she had worked as a development executive. Gregory Ellwood had spent years as a film editor at both the Los Angeles Times and MSN.com. Together they mapped the entertainment media landscape and found a hole between two poles: trade publications like the Hollywood Reporter, which served the industry itself, and gossip-driven sites like TMZ, which served a very different appetite. Sargent and Ellwood wanted to occupy the middle ground, covering film, music, and television with genuine critical weight. They also made a deliberate demographic choice. The entertainment web was largely female-driven, and they decided to skew their editorial voice slightly toward male readers in the 18-to-34 age range. That targeting was unusual enough to be a selling point when they went looking for money.

• 3. The Money Behind the Launch

  ›

  Golden Seeds, ranked at the time as the fourth largest angel investment group in the United States, provided HitFix with its first outside funding in 2009. That initial backing opened the door to a more substantial relationship with Tech Coast Angels, one of the largest angel networks in Southern California. In February 2009 Tech Coast Angels put in $850,000. Then in June 2010 they returned with an additional $1,600,000. Beyond those two lead investors, HitFix also drew backing from HBS Angels, Liquid Capital, and a backer named Gordon Crawford.

• 4. The Writers Who Defined It

  ›

  Drew McWeeny, who had previously written for Ain't It Cool News under the pen name Moriarty, brought a screenwriter's perspective to movie coverage. He announced his move to HitFix in 2008 through a review of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which made the transition itself a piece of editorial content. He covered the movie industry there until the 20th of September 2016, when he announced via Twitter that he was leaving. Alan Sepinwall arrived at HitFix in April 2010, after fourteen years at The Star-Ledger. Sepinwall had built a readership through his blog What's Alan Watching, and his reputation had grown large enough that NBC executives named him personally as a factor in the renewal of Chuck. Slate described him as having changed the nature of television criticism.

• 5. Reach and Credibility

  ›

  Crossing one million unique users per month in mid-2010 gave HitFix a number it could show to advertisers and investors, but the site's credibility also came from how the wider press treated it. Time, the Los Angeles Times, HuffPost, E! Online, and The Daily Herald each cited HitFix as a source for their own reporting. Being sourced by outlets of that profile positioned HitFix as a primary rather than a secondary voice in entertainment journalism. That standing made the site's eventual absorption into a larger company a more consequential event than a simple traffic acquisition.

• 6. Absorption and Disappearance

  ›

  In April 2016, Woven Digital acquired HitFix and folded it into its portfolio as a brand. Woven Digital also owned Uproxx, and by November 2016 the HitFix domain had been converted from a standalone site into a redirect pointing to Uproxx. The editorial identity that Sargent and Ellwood had built over roughly eight years effectively dissolved into the larger property. McWeeny's departure in September 2016, announced the same year the brand changed hands, marked the end of one of the site's most distinctive voices just as the redirect made the old HitFix URL a memory.