You cannot apply Tech Startup Economics to a Journalism company and expect it to operate ethically. All VC-based startups are operating on a set of incentives which are already unethical, but doubly so for journalists http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/11/mic-lays-off-almost-everyone-and-aims-for-a-last-ditch-sale-to-bustle/ …

You cannot chase Startup Tech VC Scale as a media company and win. It just isn't possible.

When Mic made the decision to chase scale at the infinite value of Big Tech it was doomed. Period. There was no win-condition.

The Truth isn't expensive. It was never expensive. It takes a fundamental misunderstanding of the business of journalism to say that. Running a startup is expensive, chasing VC-defined "scale" is expensive.

Telling the truth is cheap. Telling it reasonably, to a specific audience, and growing your audience in concert with what truth you decide to tell is a business. Chasing scale is not a business, it is a cash-out strategy.

The problem is that the scale that VCs are defining and that Mic is trying to chase is a lie. The numbers were never really there. Eventually they were always going to disappear as fraudulent traffic and metrics fell apart. This is still occurring.

The only definitive fact about web traffic is: we have not yet fallen to peak human traffic yet. We're still floating somewhere above reality. There's still further to fall. Have a parachute.

If you are a VC-funded media company then the two of you, VC and your company, are sharing a parachute on a very long fall. When the clouds clear and you still can't see the ground the VC *will* push you to the ground and keep the parachute for themselves. This is how it works.

To be a manager and hire people into a VC-funded media company is to act without a care for the well-being of your employees. One day they will be fired without notice. They will not be treated well. If you told them otherwise you are lying.

This is fundamentally the least ethical part of a shitshow of disastrous ethical violations. VC-funded Media startups are burning the marketplace and their employees to make some profit for the top-level managers. It's the people whose job it is to tell truth that suffer.

So this happens *every damn time*: (PS: if you are a Mic employee in NYC, reach out and I'll buy you a drink/coffee/lunch. My DMs are open.)

The other worst part is that VC-backed ethics-free "disruption" of journalism hurts companies trying to operate legitimately by using VC money to fund driving the marketplace for ads and labor to the bottom.

Exactly: Mic isn't the only one. And the VC model forces journalism organizations to push their journalists to do worse work for less while gaming the system to try and look more competitive.

There are plenty of people at Mic who did good work in a bad system, but that good work was despite the system, not because of it.



At a VC-backed Media Startup journalists are just the Uber drivers of content creation.

There is no exit for the journalists. They will just get spun off while the "media company" pivots to something else. The CMS, their Ad Tech, whatever. It happened before, it will happen again.

And that's the best case scenario, assuming the whole thing doesn't just fall apart one day, having burned their brand value for scale, turning the site off and ripping the copper from the walls.

Exactly, and not only that, it is rarely the journalists who leave the startups with more money than they had going in, even though no media startup could exist without their work.

It is depressing to think about how often in the past Mic was held up as an exemplar of How The News Should Work. It's troubling to think how many people thought Mic were the ones to follow when it was really the blind leading the blind.

You can follow @Chronotope.

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