This year, it earned awards from the American Society of Magazine Editors and the Radio Television Digital News Association for a story and a video on the opioid epidemic, produced with Time magazine.
Mic, along with the American Civil Liberties Union and Kim Kardashian West, also successfully campaigned for the release of Alice Marie Johnson, who had been serving life in prison for a nonviolent drug conviction until President Trump commuted her sentence this year.
The two employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that Mic had come to lean too heavily on a partnership with Facebook, which provided funding for a Mic-produced show on the social network’s Facebook Watch video platform.
“For those of us who didn’t have insight into the financials, the shock was just that we were relying so heavily on it,” said one of the employees, a senior member of the editorial staff.
Facebook had signaled for some time that it would walk back the investment, which was part of a broader initiative introduced in June that included similar deals with several newsrooms.
Mic, too, invested heavily in the partnership, its largest, under the expectation that it would last at least a year. But, just before Thanksgiving, the social network suggested that, in 2019, it would effectively cancel the show, “Mic Dispatch.”
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/business/media/mic-staff-layoff.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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