Amanda Congdon's fame, at least among Web-heads and media nerds, bloomed online last year with her snappy, three-minute daily news segments on Rocketboom.com, the New York-based indie video blog that dallies with the day's headlines. But Hollywood beckoned.
So after a very public falling-out with the site's creator last summer, she packed up and headed to L.A. She landed in Santa Monica just last month and now -- faster than you can say Rocketboom -- she has a development deal at HBO, a video blog with ABC News, a team of high-juice agents at Endeavor and a solid shot at making that treacherous crossing from Web-born personality to Hollywood.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Thursday November 30, 2006 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 3 inches; 96 words Type of Material: Correction
Amanda Congdon: An article in Friday's Calendar section about video blogger Amanda Congdon said that a feud between her and Rocketboom.com creator Andrew Baron spiked Rocketboom's viewership to more than 1 million last summer, but that the figure had dropped to 150,000 by November, according to Web traffic monitor Alexa.com. This was a misinterpretation of the Alexa.com data. The feud spiked Rocketboom.com visits by Alexa.com toolbar users -- not Web-wide viewers -- to about 1,150 last summer, and then visits dropped to 150 in November, the average number of visits the site received before Congdon's departure.
Congdon, repped since May by Endeavor's Ari Emanuel, is known for her impish delivery, signature hair-flip, script toss and, yes, her snug-fitting T-shirts. On Rocketboom, she talked former vice presidential nominee John Edwards into reminiscing about his facial hair, quizzed passersby with "Why is President Bush so awesome?" and donned a baseball cap, uni-brow and goatee to portray beleaguered Sprint PCS customer "Travis." It's this ironic whimsy, delivered with a mix of sarcasm, slick editing and DIY spirit, that caught fire online, catapulting Rocketboom's viewership from about 700 in 2004 to more than 300,000 last summer. Every week, Congdon, now 25, seemed to get a little blonder, a little more polished, until suddenly she was appearing as herself on "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," and entertaining CNN host Howard Kurtz with quirky camera changes.
But Rocketboom creator Andrew Baron was not quite so sanguine about the way she leveraged her Internet fame into TV. When asked why he hired Congdon over 400 other candidates in 2004, he demurred.
"I'm really pretty angry about the way Amanda left," he said by phone from New York. "My jaw's a bit dropped still. I can't believe everything she did, so until everything gets resolved and cleaned up
Now that Congdon's here in L.A., she's dead-focused on making the most of all this attention.
On a recent weekday afternoon in her new digs, Congdon answered the door in a loose ponytail, black leggings, a T-shirt and wedges, looking far more Silver Lake hipster than Upper West Side native making a Hollywood play. She does, however, have an actor's demeanor and diction, and she answers questions in paragraph form like a movie junket pro.
