Editor’s Note: On 14 December 2025, Quillette marked its tenth anniversary with a celebration attended by friends and supporters at Watsons Bay Hotel on Sydney Harbour. What follows is the speech delivered by Quillette’s founder and editor-in-chief, Claire Lehmann.
Good evening, everyone.
About a decade ago, I noticed something changing in journalism. Leading broadsheet newspapers were beginning to publish work that was noticeably lower in quality than what they had traditionally produced.
At the time, it wasn’t immediately clear why this was happening. But I suspected the internet had something to do with it. A new kind of journalism was emerging—one driven less by accuracy or depth, and more by clicks, outrage, and self-expression.
This style of journalism was typified by online verticals like Fairfax’s Daily Life, and American platforms such as Gawker and Jezebel. Headlines became increasingly confessional and trivial.
I never intended to become a journalist. In 2015, I was training to become a forensic psychologist. But articles like these aggravated me so much that I started writing about them. I created a blog and began responding to what I was reading—debunking arguments that I thought were facile, poorly reasoned, or simply untrue.
