Fri, 2016-01-29 07:51
Sam Whitmore
Mic: Ignore at Own Risk
Mic now reaches 30 million readers each month. It just recruited Ruth Reader from VentureBeat to cover "innovative technology and the people behind it." That sounds promising. But Mic's relentless focus on big ideas -- sublime and ridiculous -- is likely to frustrate PR for a while yet.
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Is the tech narrative endangered? Lately we've cased the web for the kinds of stories we used to see everywhere -- the 600-to-800 word news story about a tech company claiming to have built something better, cheaper or faster, or otherwise out to change the world. We found far fewer than we expected, even where they once were abundant.
A subscriber recently asked us, "What stories are better conceived as sponsored content than as earned media?" Great question. That's why we spent time this week studying sponsored content in some of the millennially-minded publications, looking to spot trends beyond the obvious. Perhaps you'll write and tell us whether we succeeded.
Trying to reach millennials? Join the club. This week we studied BuzzFeed, Fusion, Mic, Ozy, Quartz, Vice, Vocativ and Vox to map PR's path to tech coverage. Here's what we learned. Millennially-minded tech reporters build their beats around "culture" and "future." No pitch will work unless so tailored.