{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "Mic's Drop: How Mic.com exploited social justice for clicks, and then abandoned a staff that believed in it.", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/164530353434/", "html": "Mic's Drop: How Mic.com exploited social justice for clicks, and then abandoned a staff that believed in it.\n

alaija:

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sighinastorm:

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ranma-official:

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kontextmaschine:

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In retrospect, it looks like Mic\u2019s commitment to social justice was never that deep \u2014 which surprised and disappointed many of the young ideologues who went to work there. (The Outline spoke to 17 current and former staffers who requested anonymity due to nondisclosure agreements.) Mic chanced upon the social justice narrative, discovered it was Facebook gold, and mined away. Now the quarry is nearly dry.
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Fascinating.\u00a0 You knew something like this had to be going on, but the specific hierarchy of the ideology and the profit-seeking, and the stark internal contrast, is a surprise to me.\u00a0 Also I didn\u2019t realize that PolicyMic was the same site.\u00a0 I haven\u2019t even thought about that name in a dog year.

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This Facebook-driven success was no accident. Every time Mic had a hit, it would distill that success into a formula and then replicate it until it was dead. Successful \u201cframeworks,\u201d or headlines, that went through this process included \u201cScience Proves TK,\u201d \u201cIn One Perfect Tweet TK,\u201d \u201cTK Reveals the One Brutal Truth About TK,\u201d and \u201cTK Celebrity Just Said TK Thing About TK Issue. Here\u2019s why that\u2019s important.\u201d At one point, according to an early staffer who has since left, news writers had to follow a formula with bolded sections, which ensured their stories didn\u2019t leave readers with any questions: The intro. The problem. The context. The takeaway.

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