‘Best Business Book of the Year’ for first-time author Sarah Frier ’11, longtime Bloomberg tech reporter

by Barbara Wiedemann

“No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram,” the first book by UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media alumna Sarah Frier, won the Financial Times/McKinsey 2020 Business Book of the Year Award during a live online ceremony from London on Tuesday, Dec. 1. The short list for the £30,000 award included authors Jill Lepore, Daniel Susskind and Reed Hastings.

“Such good company for the young Sarah Frier, and such a good read. Buy this book!” Dean Susan King tweeted as the news broke.

Frier is a longtime Bloomberg journalist covering social media from San Francisco who interned with Bloomberg News while a student at UNC-Chapel Hill. She has been with the business news powerhouse since she graduated from Carolina with a degree in media and journalism in 2011.

Financial Times editor Roula Khalaf chaired the judges for this year’s competition. She said that “No Filter” tackled “two vital issues of our age: how Big Tech treats smaller rivals and how social media companies are shaping the lives of a new generation.”

In a September 2020 virtual visit with UNC Hussman Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics Professor Penny Muse Abernathy’s class, Frier told the Zoom-assembled Carolina graduate students that she’d taken Abernathy’s MEJO 752 “Leadership in a Time of Change” class a decade ago as an undergraduate student at Carolina.

“At the end of class, Penny predicted that I would write a book within ten years,” Frier said with a laugh, noting that she had made it just under the wire.

“I think I said five,” Abernathy quipped.

Frier told students that she’d been focusing on Twitter and Facebook and other apps from a business perspective when she decided to add Instagram to her Bloomberg beat, curious to dig into the image-based social media app’s societal impact as well as its explosive growth. When she wrote about Instagram for a 2018 Businessweek story, “people talked about it for months,” said Frier. She knew she was onto something.

The journalist pitched a book on Instagram in August of that year, and went to work with Simon & Schuster.

“My friend Brad Stone says ‘If you find 100 things that have never been written before, you have a book,’” Frier told the UNC Hussman students.

She shared details of how she did the bulk of her reporting after the book deal was accepted. She kept track of anecdotes under four different color-coded sets of notecards, relentlessly reaching out to five people every day with the goal of talking with at least one in person every day.

Frier took a book leave and turned in a first draft in July 2019. Then, the hard work began.

“Revisions are insane. They’re the hardest part,” Frier said frankly. “Show not tell. That was my mantra as a journalist,” she added. “‘Don’t let yourself get into the story.’ But for the book, I spent more time talking about why I was writing what I did, and putting the right context around it.”

“No Filter” was published early in 2020 by Simon & Schuster in the U.S. and Random House Business in Europe. Frier’s book tour in April changed to virtual-only in light of the global coronavirus pandemic.

The Financial Times noted that the pandemic’s timing drove more people online, making the book that much more timely — and that “No Filter” became even more relevant as tech companies’ increased revenues and tighter scrutiny by antitrust authorities brought more attention to the social media app. The Times praised the book as a “deeply-sourced inside story of Instagram and its relationship with owner Facebook.”

“Instagram’s two founders [Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger] agreed to talk with me,” said Frier about two of the many key Bay Area sources she has built up over a decade in tech reporting. “A month later, they quit their jobs. They had an important side to tell, so it was good timing.”

McKinsey Global Managing Partner Kevin Sneader presented Frier with today’s award online. He described “No Filter” as “a compelling saga about how this start-up phenomenon deeply embedded itself into the global cultural Zeitgeist.”

Frier celebrated the win with her husband (a fellow Carolina graduate) and their puppy Marlowe, who has his own Instagram account: @marlowethebeagle.