Mic was an easy company to make fun of. (I guess I technically shouldn’t use the past tense, since Bustle Digital Group is still churning out content at the URL. But I mean the ur-Mic, the one that laid everybody off and had a firesale of its brand assets last November.) There was such a disconnect between its high-minded rhetoric and its editorial strategy, which — with important exceptions! — seemed largely based on low-grade aggregation of things that make liberal millennials so mad. (Things Mic actually said out loud at some point: Mic “is the Voice Of the Future, and Will Make Millennials Part Of the Political Process.” Mic “is the voice of our generation.”
But Mic was also, in its way, an exemplar of a certain generation of social-fueled, millennial-seeking digital news site, one that got lots wrong but a few important things right. So I’m glad that HuffPost’s Maxwell Strachan went deep in this new piece on what happened to the onetime industry darling. Here are a few of the highlights and lowlights:
"They took in a lot of people like me who probably A, would have never been hired in media, or B, would have been interns somewhere & gotten some old white guy coffee.”
Mic was not perfect…not at all. But, I believe its end left a gaping hole in media.https://t.co/7gQ1Om7X69
— Kendall Ciesemier (@kciesemier) July 23, 2019
This piece about Mic’s downfall is devastating. The worst part is that many of its structural issues — the aggressive pivoting, the instability, the exploiting writers’ pain for clicks, the salary disparity — apply to plenty of media outlets out there.https://t.co/bxy7lMtlbw
— Andrea González-Ramírez (@andreagonram) July 23, 2019
In One Email, This Executive Just Perfectly Summed Up The Problem With Digital Media https://t.co/qeiTYtUBKO pic.twitter.com/nwbf40CrpY
— Steven Perlberg (@perlberg) July 23, 2019
There is so much to say about this story, but one thing that strikes me is this: Thinking you can do without a human resources department as you build a company is a mind-boggling degree of hubris https://t.co/sYCqnA5pWJ
— Hayley MacMillen (@hlmacmillen) July 23, 2019
The entire Mic saga can be summed up by something @CaseyNewton says all the time: traffic is not an audience https://t.co/JWVsvAHJQG
— nilay patel (@reckless) July 23, 2019
It captures much of the generational tension within companies today but also the upending of "objectivity" in journalism and the success bringing your unique lens to the work can have. pic.twitter.com/25tAXAICXp
— S. Mitra Kalita (@mitrakalita) July 23, 2019
Wild tidbit in Huff Post’s Mic postmortem: higher-ups said healthcare was too boring to write about https://t.co/euZeS5YZqA pic.twitter.com/NjixmIFQBy
— Natalie Shure (@nataliesurely) July 23, 2019
This sentence appears in so many founding stories and it always slays me how casual it seems. https://t.co/399KquvJWJ pic.twitter.com/A1zjBd2A0I
— Sean Blanda (@SeanBlanda) July 23, 2019
“During the reporting process, which took several months, Bustle Digital Group, through its lawyers, threatened to sue HuffPost’s parent company if we published this story.“ https://t.co/yDGF1SFrti
— Peter Kafka (@pkafka) July 23, 2019
“…Mic at times relied on its young and diverse staff to churn out content, respond nimbly to every change in the Facebook algorithm and sometimes even mine their personal pain for clicks in the pursuit of blistering traffic growth.” https://t.co/zxAGm13mBJ
— Monica Castillo (@mcastimovies) July 23, 2019
is it that Mic was regarded too highly given its own internal issues? raised too much funding, too quickly? that media companies should avoid VC dollars, or journalists should steer clear of VC-funded newsrooms? /2
— Rachel Cohen (@rmc031) July 23, 2019
If the lesson is don't hope catering to the whims of Facebook and Google will save you — okay, yeah I think it's safe to say we've learned that by now. That's not just VC-backed companies though. They've decimated local media everywhere https://t.co/376ADX8iuq
— Rachel Cohen (@rmc031) July 23, 2019
“somehow” is doing a lot of work in this sentence. https://t.co/miYV9SRNnF pic.twitter.com/tHsNZ2Gc9y
— rvb (@ryanvailbrown) July 23, 2019
For all that Mic got wrong, here's what folks inside the company got right: they trusted the people most impacted by stories to tell them. That's still controversial in journalism, but it works. Inspired by the folks I met there. Here's a few (thread):https://t.co/BJjz0567sK
— Jamilah King (@jamilahking) July 23, 2019
Thread 👇🏻. Mic was the first and only place to let me publish regularly on what is now my full time beat. I got my job at Daily Beast (and now Atlantic) off my Mic clips. I will always be grateful for the opportunity the company/@_Cooper gave me 🙏🏻 https://t.co/8lbXIKKbmA
— Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) July 23, 2019
I totally forgot about the “This One Tweet” era of digital media https://t.co/Bv0Fcg5Lzv pic.twitter.com/jFDn0H9PiN
— Internet Person™⭐️ (@TimHerrera) July 23, 2019
“Employees had other frustrations with the financial side of startup life. When Mic passed out the custom-made Nikes in 2015, the company had already raised more than $30 million but had yet to set up a 401(k) system.” https://t.co/AuEvKpUQkX
— Lainna Fader 🦋 (@lainnafader) July 23, 2019
The story of Mic isn't unique whatsoever; if you want to understand what's happening in digital media at large, this is the article to read.
I remember writing a few pieces for Mic in 2013 when it was still called PolicyMic and was a contributor platform. https://t.co/wAiaO3tgqk
— Lily Herman (@lkherman) July 23, 2019
Tbh I often have a hard time telling college students how to get started in this industry.
I was helped so much by startups and structures that don't exist anymore. I got the editorial mentorship I did in large part because everybody POURED money into digital media properties.
— Lily Herman (@lkherman) July 23, 2019
And those that haven't disappeared have shrunk their staffs, rarely take freelancers (or look for already established ones), and don't really give a ton of feedback.
— Lily Herman (@lkherman) July 23, 2019
