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[Kazza]

Interesting article. I've quoted some of what I think are the most interesting parts, but the article itself is well worth a read.

It sounds that the site started with noble intentions:

The site started in 2010 as PolicyMic, an evenhanded, forgettable politics website where unpaid contributors posted commentary that could be upvoted by other site members. The PolicyMic origin story was that Chris Altchek, a Goldman Sachs banker who leaned conservative, was always debating his friend Jake Horowitz, a foreign policy columnist for Change.org who leaned liberal. The two had fierce debates about the issues of the day, and they wanted to convert that spirit into a website “to help our generation talk about the issues that really matter,”

In its early days, the site published left-leaning stories alongside right-leaning takes like, “Is There a Media Bias Against Ron Paul?” and “The One Chart That Shows Why Even Unions Are Abandoning Obamacare.”

But it soon started to take a bad turn:

The site also started to develop an inertia around a certain type of story: simple, emotional social justice narratives. The success of personal, identity-driven essays like “5 Powerful Reasons I'm a (Male) Feminist,” “An Open Letter to the Pope From a Gay Man,” and “An Open Letter to Abercrombie and Fitch from a Formerly Homeless Kid” inspired Mic to launch an “Identities” section in October 2013 “dedicated to examining the intersections of sexuality, gender, class and race in politics and culture for the millennial generation.” These stories got traction on Facebook, so Mic replicated them, attracting more social justice readers as well as more social justice writers, who then wrote more social justice stories. “Mic realized earlier than most places that they could commodify people’s feelings about race and gender," was the view of one early staffer who has since left.

“It seemed as if we were trying to position ourselves as, ‘We are the definition of woke, and this is how you break down this narrative or fight the mainstream.’”

Many of the writers started to realise that the owners didn't necessarily share their deep moral conviction for social justice, and were instead using it as a cynical way to get clicks:

In another instance, a former staffer told me about how Horowitz, who served as editor in chief of the site until mid-2015 and is now editor at large, once interrupted a reporter pitching a video about a woman building rooftop gardens in New Orleans: “‘But, is she black? Is she black?’" the former staffer recalled Horowitz asking, “as if the story would be less impactful had the woman doing the work been white or Hispanic or Martian.” When the site was pushing into original comedy, Altchek told multiple staffers that he wanted to make “the next Chappelle Show, except it’s hosted by a trans woman of color.”

We were run by people who did not believe the things that their staffers were hired to write about and their staffers truly believed in.”

It talks a lot about how they wrote articles to game the algorithm. Sounds like a miserable job for a writer:

Mic, perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, had already hired Bleacher Report veteran Michael Cahill in May 2015 as its director of search engine optimization. His task was to translate Mic’s Facebook optimization process to Google. This meant analyzing search trends in order to generate key phrases — everything from “What time is the convention” and “Watch Trump’s speech live” to “How to pick up women” — and assigning those key phrases to a staff of SEO writers, who then reverse-engineered stories around them. “He starts building this little team. They’re off in their own world. Garbage shit. Typos everywhere. ‘Keyword keyword 2017 colon how when where why.’ These poor kids are writing like ten of these a day,”

Now, some former staffers reflect on whether or not their advocacy and writing had the opposite effect to that intended:

After November 8, some of Mic’s staffers questioned whether the site had contributed to the political divisiveness, lobotomizing of the media, and complacency on the left that post-election thinkpieces cited as factors in Hillary Clinton’s fall and Donald Trump’s triumph. “It kills me when I think about the contribution of liberal media in what happened in the election,” said a former employee who was with the company until this year. “When I think about the role Mic played in growing that sentiment of moral outrage — and it then bleeding into publications that you think should have risen above it — it doesn’t feel good.”

“It ratchets everything up to 11, to a point where if everything is an outrage, nothing is an outrage,” the staffer who left in 2017 said. “Everything is the biggest deal in the world because you’re trying to create traffic, and it desensitizes us to what are actually huge breaks in social and political norms.”

Last quote:

In retrospect, it looks like Mic’s commitment to social justice was never that deep — which surprised and disappointed many of the young ideologues who went to work there. Mic chanced upon the social justice narrative, discovered it was Facebook gold, and mined away. Now the quarry is nearly dry.

Apparently they have recently laid off 25 staff and want to "make Mic the leader in visual journalism".

 

[Cunth]

Using social justice to get clicks? Sounds like every media company since Trump was elected

 

[MayauMiao]

SJWs abandon their own. They truly deserved it.

 

[Kazza]

Reading this article from 4 years ago is pretty funny. Knowing what we know now, this starting quote didn't age well:

Mic is a very popular news and media company that helps millennials stay informed by providing them with premium content and insightful stories that define this tech-savvy generation.

"Premium content and insightful stories" = clickbait stories written around keywords, designed to game an algorithm, and written by teams of dispirited "journalists"
"tech-savvy generation" = people gullible enough to fall for said clickbait stories.

 

[oagboghi2]

What even is the point of "social justice journalism"? It just sounds like a cute way to say propaganda.

I look at the popularity of podcasts and YouTube and I feel like there is a audience for just straight up "truthful" journalism. Not constantly pushing an agenda or a certain narrative.