Mic lays off most of its staff

Video-centric news outlet is poised to be sold to Bustle Digital Group, reports say.

The phrase “pivot to video” haunted digital journalists in 2016 and 2017, as publication after publication announced that they were laying off writers to redirect their resources into making videos.

Mic, a digital publication focusing on a millennial audience, was one of the outlets that adopted that strategy. In 2017 it laid off 25 people, mostly from news and editorial, to become “the leader in visual journalism,” founder Chris Altchek wrote at the time.

The pivot, it seems, did not save them. On Thursday, Mic laid off most of its staff amid reports that it is preparing to sell itself to Bustle Digital Group.

But the pivot was just a symptom of a bigger problem: how to make a digital journalism venture profitable. Mic’s other attempts to turn $60 million in venture funding into a sustainable business model also failed.

The layoffs, first reported by Recode, were announced during a Thursday morning staff meeting with Altchek. According to one laid-off staffer, the meeting was brief and expected: Earlier media reports revealed the dire situation. The layoffs included Mic’s entire editorial team, video and written, the staffer said. The company, founded in 2011 as PolicyMic and rebranded to simply Mic in 2014, employed more than 100 people as of September.

Mic’s traffic dropped precipitously over the last year. In April, Digiday reported that Mic’s website was down to 5 million monthly unique visitors. Just a year earlier that number was 17 million. None of Mic’s other sources of audience — particularly Facebook — were offsetting that steep drop.

Mic Publisher Cory Haik announced in a note to staff that she was resigning from the company. “Our business models are unsettled, and the macro forces at play are all going through their own states of unrest .... I am proud to have been a part of an org that earnestly tried to solve some of these confounding issues. And I hope you all take some comfort in knowing that your work will transcend this moment.”

The Wall Street Journal reported in September that Mic was considering an acquisition offer from another media company, as executives believed the company would have to either sell or cut costs within a year. Earlier this week, Recode reported that Mic’s show on Facebook Watch had been canceled, limiting the company’s options even further.

Mic’s former executive news director, Kerry Lauerman — who also resigned — said in an interview that he was proud of the work Mic’s team achieved.

“Clearly, there were some risks taken that didn’t pay off. Today, the staff is really sad, but we’re enormously proud of the work we’ve done through it all,” Lauerman said. He singled out the work of the Facebook Watch video team, noting that it had recently produced stories embedded in the large migrant caravan in Mexico.

Mic was one of many publications that pinned its hopes for growth on traffic that came via Facebook as it pushed to meet its investors’ expectations.

“Most newsrooms have come to regret making hiring and investment decisions based on the whims of a company that really doesn’t care much about journalism,” said Bill Grueskin, a professor at Columbia Journalism School.