Claire Zulkey

zulkey.com

Evanston native Claire Zulkey is Chicago’s living example of an Internet success story: a blogger who capitalized on word-of-mouth buzz to launch a writing career. She muses about The Office and Dancing with the Stars for the Los Angeles Times’ Show Tracker (latimesblogs.latimes.com/showtracker), about Beauty and the Geek for The Onion’s A.V. Club (avclub.com), and for her site, Zulkey.com, where her pithy daily postings about pop culture share space with interviews with personalities such as Hal Hartley and Jennifer Egan. She also freelances for several national magazines and newspapers, runs an occasional reading series at the Hideout called Funny Ha Ha, and works full time for a medical journal.

“I don’t log my hours [online]. If I did, I’d probably cry because I’d realize how much money I’m not making,” Zulkey says. All of these duties leave Zulkey less time to devote to the site that started it all, yet she manages to update Zulkey.com nearly every day.

She attributes some of her success to timing: In 2002, when she started Zulkey.com, the Internet was sparsely populated. “[Back then], blogging was like social networking before it happened,” she explains. With little competition, she quickly earned up to 750,000 page views in 2003. As her blog became more widely read, editors at sites like the now-defunct culture blog the Black Table gave her regular features, which translated to assignments for big-name outlets such as the Huffington Post and the Chicago Tribune. “I didn’t set out to be a networker, but that’s how it [happened],” she says.

Zulkey’s success rests more on talent than happy circumstance. Last year, she finished her M.A. in creative writing at Northwestern while completing her second book, a young-adult novel tentatively titled An Off Year that’s due from Penguin in 2009.

Meanwhile, Zulkey has increased her Onion coverage to include analyzing American Idol, which has received positive feedback from readers: “It is always refreshing to find someone…enjoying a reality competition series without ounces of sarcasm,” reads one representative A.V. comment. But Zulkey doesn’t take praise too seriously: “I do something stupid for a living, and I’m fine with it.”

— Eugenia Williamson