Daniel Mintz
This is a strange moment of reckoning for Peter Koechley. About a decade ago, he was churning out “fake news” stories as managing editor for The Onion. Then, a few years later, he founded Upworthy, a viral content website that popularized clickbait-style headlines designed to grab attention on Facebook newsfeeds.
Now, one of the biggest stories in the world is the problem of fake news on Facebook.
“When we were writing fake news at The Onion, the idea was to get to a deeper truth [with satire] than you would if you just stuck to the facts. It’s very different than the pernicious fake news of today, where people are intentionally trying to mislead and profit off that misleading,” Koechley tells Isthmus. “I feel like I’m watching all of this from a very unique vantage point.”
Koechley, a 1999 graduate of Madison West High School who now lives in Brooklyn, New York, was a featured speaker at a Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce luncheon Friday morning at the Kohl Center. Addressing a sold-out crowd, Koechley announced that two weeks ago he left Upworthy after more than five years of leading the company.
“I don’t know where I’m headed next,” Koechley told the crowd. “The only thing I know for sure is that I am not going to be a startup CEO again. I’m going to start from scratch.”
In an interview after his speech, Koechley says his decision to leave stemmed from a desire to seek out new challenges. He wants to push himself to continue learning — and that means seeking out new teachers. “It’s such an incredible experience to get the chance to run a startup. You learn so much just by doing,” he says. “But I think after a while I’ve gotten hungry to learn more from other people. I’ve learned more than enough from myself.”
Koechley feels he’s at his best when he’s working at the intersection of storytelling, strategic communication, technology and social change. But he’s concerned about new challenges in the media landscape, particularly at a time when “there’s no actual authority or shared sense of truth” and when people are seeking out and consuming media that reinforces what they already believe. “That’s one of the biggest problems to figure out how to solve,” he says. “And I don’t have the answer.”
And he might not be the one to find it. For a man whose former company trafficks in heartwarming stories of kindness, empathy and social good, Koechley has a surprisingly stark outlook on how the current political climate will play out, particularly for the most vulnerable members of society. He worries about “upheaval on multiple fronts” exacerbating current challenges, such as economic inequality. “I think there’s no denying that real pain and suffering is going to come to a lot of people we care about in the coming years,” he says. “I’m not Pollyanna-ish about it.”
But he is heartened and “legitimately inspired” by the recent groundswell civic activism spawned in response to President Donald Trump’s administration, saying that the resistance movement is more diverse and innovative than he expected or hoped it would be. And he’s is optimistic about the future of Upworthy and its role in telling stories that build empathy and inspire action.
“Resistance is good, resistance is necessary, but still a lot of really mean-spirited, hateful stuff will come to pass,” he says. “I’m certainly trying to be as vigilant as we can be.”
