Behind the collapse of Mic: a farewell to algorithms
Last week news came out that Mic, a publication that I once worked at for the better part of two years, laid off its entire editorial staff.
Staffers were given zero warning. Management told them during a Thursday morning meeting that their computer access would be cut off at 2 p.m., that they’d get just one month of severance, and that they would not have the option to keep their health insurance beyond December.
To a casual reader of the publication, this might come as a surprise. Just a few years ago, Mic was a formidable operation, garnering around 30 million readers a month and raking in tens of millions of dollars in venture capital every time it raised money because it seemed like it really could one day become what it promised it would: the top news site for millennials in the nation.
But in the last couple of years its traffic plunged, staff was shoved out the door in waves, and finally Mic was sold to Bustle for just $5 million, a tiny fraction of the $100 million it was valued at just last year. There’s also reason to believe that Mic, which has always presented itself first and foremost as an enterprise concerned with social justice, got rid of its staff in order to ensure that Bustle won’t have to deal with a unionizing group of workers. Maybe that was part of the deal?
Mic’s astonishing rise and fall is in many ways a distillation of the media sector’s revenue crisis, and a cautionary tale for publications that recklessly chase traffic and fads. To most of us who were ever on the inside, it was obvious that this end was coming.
When I was brought on to Mic as a politics writer in 2014, I found the experience to be, somewhat paradoxically, both electric and hypnotically cozy. The electric part of it was that Mic was a rocketship, it was going places. A staff of a few dozen 20-something year olds was giving some of the country’s biggest newsrooms a run for their money, traffic-wise. And it was doing it for a good reason: to amplify the voices of those living on the margins.
Every morning I came in to our cramped office in SoHo and wrote about the misrule of the 1%, about Black Lives Matter, about why Bernie Sanders was to be taken seriously. Every morning I sipped on tea and looked out the windows over water towers and a gently waving American flag and felt honored that I could be part of the journey. It was intoxicating to write wonky policy pieces about food stamps or taxes or backward drug policy and see them often get hundreds of thousands of views, sometimes millions. Our reach meant we had interview access to US lawmakers, to cabinet officials, to the president. I had traffic goals, but I was also given a lot of latitude to write edgier pieces about class warfare and Cornel West’s value as a public intellectual and how Black Lives Matter should look to the Black Panthers as an organizing model.
A great deal of the feeling of coziness came from the end-of-week meetings. We discussed big wins in terms of traffic, but we also talked about articles that were exceptionally insightful or well-written. There was a weekly ritual where people would “pass the beer” to each other to congratulate someone for a job well done or helping them out with some specific problem they had. And employees were allowed to pose questions to the co-founders of the company — in-person or anonymously in advance of the meeting. I was particularly impressed by that last practice for its attempt to institutionalize transparency and accountability for management. There was, to me, a real feeling that we were all in it together.
That didn’t last.
Mic’s traffic and all of its prospects for building advertising revenue were all tied to one thing: Facebook. In its early days, the editor-in-chief of Mic had effectively hacked the algorithm of Facebook’s newsfeed — he had a preternatural ability to predict what topics would resonate with young people on it, and, crucially, how to frame the headlines and share text for articles to ensure stories would go viral. Mic’s headlines often involved hyperbole and what’s sometimes called “a curiosity gap” — an invitation to the reader to click through to figure out what “nobody is talking about.” At first, I viewed the practice as a necessary evil. Using an obnoxious headline to inspire people to read legitimate articles struck me as pretty benign, and the articles that went freakishly viral — many millions of reads within hours — helped subsidize the less click-baity articles.
But when Facebook started to change its algorithm, everything seemed to take a turn for the worse. Facebook started to make a series of changes to its newsfeed formulas that made news sites generally less popular, and specifically reduced the reach of sensationalistic headline framings like Mic’s, ostensibly in a bid to discourage clickbait. Instead of trying to find ways to diversify traffic and adjust to the algorithm, Mic decided to start throwing everything that wasn’t guaranteed to generate virality under the bus. I recall being told that an article with the words “health care” in the headlines was too stuffy, and implicitly that covering the topic was more or less pointless. Editorial guidelines changed constantly and incoherently; people were randomly fired and disappeared; the anonymous questions for management practice was scrapped; reporters were forced to work on atrocious streaming services like “Facebook Live”; and the imperative to find some way, any way, to maintain Mic’s peak traffic displaced its putative editorial mission. One particularly distasteful part of this was what felt like an increasingly exploitative attitude toward both reporters of color and the topics they were asked to cover.
Facebook is a fickle god, and it is not a benevolent one. And watching Mic’s leadership’s willingness to sacrifice anything and anyone in order to reap more traffic was a sad spectacle. After I left Mic, things seemed to get far worse. In particular, Mic decided to lay off large parts of its editorial staff in order to pursue a “pivot to video” in order to cater to Facebook’s insistence that its users wanted video content more than anything else. Turns out Facebook deliberately lied, and those who had been expelled from the company had been expelled in vain.
Facebook is such a big distributor of traffic that no news operation can afford to ignore it, but it is not a neutral distributor. It’s a bit like if the paperboy went rogue, decided to put a gun to the temple of a newspaper editor and barked that unless he gets a cut of the sales he’ll pull the trigger.
In the case of Mic, Facebook pulled the trigger. Even after Mic went all in on video, causing its traffic to plummet, Facebook recently canceled a major video contract with Mic, and that was allegedly the last straw, spurring the sale to Bustle.
Mic was always going to experience a plunge in traffic due to Facebook’s changes, like any other news outlet. And given the amount of venture capital it received, the pressure it had to scale was immense. But it chose to respond to these pressures without integrity toward its own workers and reneged on the principles that it claimed as its raison d'etre. Some of my former colleagues say that Mic’s commitment to social justice was always a branding maneuver, not an essential part of its DNA. Perhaps it makes me naive, but for a brief moment I had been a believer.
Correspondence
I've really enjoyed receiving emails from some of you in response to newsletters (for those who don't know, you can reply directly to them). Any feedback on the newsletters or thoughts on its contents — or anything else on your mind — is always welcome and appreciated. I may also publish some responses in the future in the vein of a "letter to the editor," if time permits and the writer is interested in it.
The centrist rebels
Liberals who like to complain that left-wing Democrats are causing division at a time when the party needs unity should take note: centrists, not left-wingers, are the ones defecting from supporting Nancy Pelosi as speaker.
Tim Ryan, a centrist from Ohio, and Seth Moulton, a centrist from Massachusetts, led the effort to get 16 lawmakers to sign a letter calling for new House leadership last week. That group includes newly elected members like moderate Conor Lamb of Pennsylvania, not democratic socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who has publicly backed Pelosi).
And the centrist Problem Solvers Caucus, whose Democratic members support Trump more often than Pelosi, dragged their feet on supporting Pelosi until they forced her to strike a deal to cut down on partisan gridlock just minutes before her nomination vote.
The result of all this: 32 defectors in the nomination vote for Pelosi on Wednesday.
I welcome dissent in the Democratic Party, of course, but it depends on the substance of it. Setting aside my personal opinion of Pelosi, what exactly are the centrist zealots envisioning here? Who is their alternative speaker? What would they stand for? All I see is vague promises to "change politics" but no compelling program behind it.
Meanwhile, the ascendant left in the Democratic Party is being strategic - focusing on staking out bold positions, backing protests, jockeying for important committee assignments with a clear vision for the future that's increasingly resonating nationwide.
What I'm reading
George H.W. Bush's forgotten legacy on war, drugs and justice.
Neil deGrasse Tyson's response to three accusations of sexual harassment — upon a first reading it looked quite fishy to me. (Here are the accusations.)
Mass immigration creates problems for the left. Tighter borders can’t be the solution.
India's dangerous new school curriculum
Lena Dunham comes to terms with herself.
What was the 1938 panic really about?
Chinese CRISPR babies.
Long reads
What happened when a white cop decided to not shoot a black man. This deeply reported story is astonishing, and the design gives the article a cinematic feel.
An artist on how to make nothing and how to do nothing.
If you want to give me any feedback or just want to share some thoughts, you can reply directly to this email and I'll be able to read it — and respond.
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