Mic Reboots Itself, With More Pop Culture Coverage and Less Politics

“I am one of the few Latina women running a newsroom,” she said. “It was really important to me that we got the identity coverage right, and that our coverage of race wasn’t just relegated to a single vertical.

“When Mic was in its heyday,” she continued, “it really led the charge in telling those stories, but it also made a lot of the mistakes that media does when it covers race. Sometimes it skewed toward outrage clicks or even race baiting. I would say a major difference is that our identity coverage now is much more balanced and nuanced.”

Mic was started in 2011 by Chris Altchek and Jake Horowitz under the name PolicyMic. In 2015, it landed a video interview with President Barack Obama and soared to a $100 million valuation. In 2018, Mic won awards from the American Society of Magazine Editors and the Radio Television Digital News Association for an article and video on the opioid epidemic, produced with Time magazine.

But business was bad, partly because of the publication’s reliance on fickle Facebook traffic. In November 2018, Mic laid off 70 people on its staff of more than 100 and was acquired by Bustle Digital Group for a reported $5 million.

Since then, Mic has hummed along quietly. A Bustle Digital Group spokeswoman said it was still attracting readers, with a monthly average of 7.5 million unique visitors this year.

Ms. Cosme came aboard in 2019 and became Mic’s top editor in January. Before joining the publication, she had worked her way up over seven years to executive editor at the youth media company Complex Networks. Within Bustle Digital Group, the publication she leads is seen as a kind of counterpart to the more mischievous Gawker, which the company restarted in July.

“We’re coming off the launch of Gawker, which is still very cynical and still can be very funny, and I think that Mic is almost in many ways at the polar opposite,” Mr. Topolsky said. “It is very interested in how can we be compassionate about the audience and the stories and the lives they are living.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/06/business/media/mic-relaunch.html