A Piece in Capital New York Made the Broad Cry Last Week

Paula froelich

Ok! So I cried in a good way! – And here’s why. I spent 4.5 years in the wilderness after I left Page Six and had some of the MOST OFFENSIVE SH-T told to me (EVER!) by male media execs including:

  • “You’re too smart for our audience.”
  • “You know what your problem is? You don’t fit in a box…” [from a cliched dude who prided himself on thinking “out of the box’]
  • “Women don’t watch travel shows.”
  • “You are great and so dynamic, but you’re from New York and smart. Our viewers are in the flyover states and god are they stupid. I don’t even watch the shit we put up on our screen for them…” [Me: “i’m from Ohio and Kentucky.” Dude: “Really? i would never have guessed.”]
  • “We are focusing on the male demographic right now – it’s what advertisers want.” [me: so you’re only hiring male talent?; Dude: Pretty much. sorry. I know women are funny – youknow women are funny, but America doesn’t like funny women.]
  • “Yeah, but whats your angle??? Everyone has to have an angle or a shtick these days!”
  • “Women are really into getting married.”
  • “Women don’t want funny travel books or essays – they only buy travel books if there is a journey involved. You know, like Eat, Pray Love.”
  • “You are so smart and funny and cool… I just wouldn’t know what to do with you.”
  • “You know what women like? Women really like beach shows. Like where the best beaches are…”
  • “You have really sexy shoes”
  • “We need to start figuring out how to get people to start buying TVs again.”

So.. along came a piece by Joe Pompeo who… got me. And got my story. It made me cry. After the jump is an excerpt, but you should read the whole thing. It’s lovely.

Excerpt:

After a decade of churning out salacious scoops on the likes of Whitney Houston’s drug habit and Britney Spears’ pregnancy, Froelich left Page Six in 2009 with a clean slate and an urge to cultivate the wanderlust she’d carried around since her post-college travels through India, Nepal and Thailand. Freelance gigs at places likePlayboy and The Daily Beast kept her busy and paid the bills, but what she really wanted was to develop her own travel brand with a populist ethos and a humorous tone—only no one was biting. “I pitched to everyone,” she said. “If someone was in charge of something, I did a pony show.”

Frustrated by what seemed like a prohibitive bar for entry in a male-dominated medium, Froelich decided to go it alone. In January, she launched A Broad Abroad, a website promising “Tales And Tips From Around The Globe.” Around the same time, Froelich landed a few far flung assignments for Newsweek and persuaded the magazine to put her on staff. Then life lobbed its next curve-ball: She was introduced to a Yahoo executive so impressed with A Broad Abroad that Froelich was offered the keys to Yahoo Travel and a chance to start her own video series.

…

Froelich, for her part, seems like she knows just how to get a digital media brand going. Her online presence betrays a tireless metabolism as she jaunts from African death markets to Mexican amusement parks to Burmese nunneries. Along the way, she posts videos and photos and status updates that lend an aspirational appeal to her Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter feeds while also promoting the brand.

Yahoo Travel itself, manned by a staff of six, is a mix of service (how to do Mexico on $17 a day), viral lists (“10 Vacation Trains That Are Totally Off The Rails”), narratives (tabloid legend George Rush scales Mount Kenya), news (Ebola and air travel) and Froelich’s web show, which kept the name “A Broad Abroad” (recent installment: “Spend the Best Day of Your Life in an Elephant Retirement home”).

Yahoo wouldn’t provide revenue or traffic figures, but the site is lush with sponsored content, and the measurement firm comScore clocked 11.9 million unique U.S. visitors (up 41 percent from a year earlier) for the month of October, making Yahoo Travel the No. 2 American travel website, sandwiched between TripAdvisor and USAToday Travel.

Froelich said that six months in, the site is already proving its value: “We’re lean and mean and we do make money.” As for her latest career pivot, she summed it up like this: “I feel like Cinderella.”