Lockhart Steele
Lockhart Steele is an American blogger best known for the Curbed family of real estate, restaurant, and shopping news sites.
Early life and career
Lockhart Steele was raised in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts. He graduated from St. Paul's School in 1992 and later, from Brown University. In his senior year, he self-published a compendium of the band Phish—The Pharmer's Almanac—with a classmate. It became a bible for the band's international followers and printed five editions before selling to Penguin Press.Steele moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan in February 2001 and built a personal blog with short news on New York's social scene. Within three years, his site was popular mainly for its New York real estate posts on apartments and restaurants, with 3,000 daily page views. He moved these posts to Curbed.com in May 2004 and by early next year, left his job at the real estate magazine Cottages & Gardens, where he was an editor, to pursue blogging. He became managing editor at Gawker Media, which was known for its successful blogging business model, and managed its 11 blogs, including its New York and Washington media gossip sites. Steele eventually split Curbed's restaurant posts to Eater.com and shopping posts to Racked.com. Vox Media purchased Steele's sites in late 2013 for an undisclosed price between $20 and 30 million in cash and stock.