Chris Altchek thinks he knows what you want---that is, if you’re a millennial. In fact, he says he knows it.
Altchek, the CEO of millennial news site Mic, has set out to build a “leading news and media company for young people” along with his cofounder, Jake Horowitz. They want to give a new generation of readers the news they want where they want to read it.
“We write with a truly authentic voice and you can see the issues that young people care about in Mic's top sections, which cover topics related to politics, feminism, race, social justice, and technology,” Altchek tells WIRED. “The majority of our staff are millennials and the stories they publish every day address the news and issues that they're most passionate about.”
And it seems to be working. With recent headlines like “This Ex-Gay Survivor Had an Amazing Courtroom Message for LGBT Teens” and “This is How Bob Marley’s Pot Brand is Trailblazing the Cannabis Industry,” Mic says it reached an audience of 30 million in May, 70 percent of which were readers under 35. Last week, the four-year old company announced $17 million in new funding, putting Mic’s total investment at upward of $30 million. The team snagged the former executive editor of NPR News, Madhulika Sikka, to join Mic as well.
All of which is, kind of, crazy. Who knew millennials were so desperate for their own kind of news? And, what is it that millennials really want anyway? That is the multi-million dollar question being asked in venture capital meetings, corporate boardrooms, and newsrooms across America. Because---haven't you heard?---millennials are confusing!
Millennials are the more than 80 million young people in the US---and growing. (Full disclosure: I'm among them.) We were born between 1980 and 1999. We’re diverse. We’re different. We’re hip. We’re *crazy.* (Read: young.) And, yes, we read news---a lot of it and on all devices. But confusing or not, monetizing our eyeballs is the key to not just the future of news, but to pleasing advertisers desperate for the attention of young spenders, and to lining the pockets of those very VCs, corporations, and news founders trying to crack into our brains. The mystery, apparently, is what we really want---when it should be whether we want, or need, these millennial niche news sites at all.
Like Mic, a few startups are promising to answer those very questions. BuzzFeed and Vice may be the best known of the crop, but the two giants started as entertainment platforms, grew an audience of young readers and viewers, then expanded into news. A ragtag team of lesser known upstarts, like Mic, Ozy, Vocativ, and Fusion, have set out to bring young readers into their news sites from the start. While the sites haven’t garnered as much attention as their bigger and bulkier counterparts, they have gotten funding or corporate backing, and a surprising amount of traffic considering their youth.
Like the venture-backed Mic, Ozy wants to get the attention of the "change generation," meaning the many millennials and some younger gen-Xers who are focused on the new, the upcoming, and the different. "We break away from the pack and are trying to be that place where people could get smarter a little bit sooner,” says Ozy CEO and cofounder Carlos Watson.
Ozy, Watson says, wants to be a breath of fresh air in a digital media landscape overflowing with options. Which is why they have stories like “Trailer Park Nation: Some Surprising Good News for Millennials,” “All Rise for Chief Justice Robot!” and “The 5 Types of Men Who Try to Marry You in India.” But when I ask Watson, 45, what the key is to attracting millennials, his answer is simple: smart and sexy.
"Ozy is making the same bet that Netflix and Spotify and Warby Parker and Pandora all are," Watson explains. "That millenials want stylish design, flavorful writing, and not just junk web video. We have clever, make-you-smile headlines. Sexy is funny, flavor, flare, it is sabor." The site sees an audience of around 10 million monthly with another 10 million reading its content through its less sexy partners, like USA Today, CNN, PBS, and Yahoo.
Vocativ, another new sites hoping to grab the attention of "the young, diverse, social generation," says it uses data and crawls the deep web to figure out what stories will do well for those readers online, featuring stories like the recent "Most Do-Gooders Are Donut Thieves," "Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini's’s Social Media Afterlife," and "What If Caitlyn Jenner Weren’t So Beautiful?"
"Our audience increasingly discovers and consumes our stories, and news in general, on social platforms where they are gathering naturally---Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and others," explains Vocativ chief content officer Greg Gittrich. "Our newsroom focuses on creating great visual stories, from videos to data visualizations to illustrations to GIFs, that are designed to live natively on social platforms." Vocativ reaches an audience of 5 million monthly uniques, it says, reaching more than 30 million on social sites.
Altchek, too, says Mic is focused on reaching users where they are. While most millennials say they keep up with the news, according to a survey from the American Press Institute, the majority get their news online. "Our content is everywhere millennials spend their time," he adds, "whether it is on social networks like Facebook or messaging apps like Snapchat."
But if the pitch to investors is that Mic, Ozy, and Vocativ are providing “sexy” stories that reach millennials on new platforms and devices, it's not clear how that's all that different from what the stodgy traditional news publishers are trying to do. Every news organization is fighting to get new readers---and "millennial" is just another way to say new and future audience.
The New York Times, for example, has aggressively been pursuing its reach on social and mobile. The company launched its NYT Now app last year to attract more mobile first readers, and has even made the app free in the hope that, if reading the Times' app becomes a part of young readers' habits, they may subscribe to its digital news as well. (A representative for the Times would not disclose how many people use NYT Now.)
The Times, like many online publishers, also aggressively shares stories on Facebook, Twitter, and even Snapchat---it has a "thenytimes" account that it rotates between Snap-happy journalists. It says it has 57 million unique readers on its website a month. And, the company was also one of nine news organizations, along with other print publishers like National Geographic, The Atlantic, and The Guardian, to be a part of Facebook's roll-out of Instant Articles, which publishers hope would be a faster and more streamlined way for Facebook users to read stories on their phones.
Print institutions aren't alone in their desire to convert young readers into lifelong fans. TV giants like, CNN and ESPN, are aggressively looking to get their name and reporting in front of young viewers too---in part, by joining Snapchat Discover, the messaging app's venue into news. Snapchat's audience is largely teens and millennials. CNN's TV audience isn't. But it has been able to get roughly one million young viewers to watch its daily videos, animations, and news stories through Discover. (For comparison, CNN saw 39 million unique users in its mobile app alone in August of last year.)
“Millennials care about hard news and global news just as much if not more than anybody else,” Meredith Artley, CNN’s editor-in-chief of Digital, tells Wired. “We’re looking for an in with that audience. And it seems to be working.” Artley says that CNN has been able to reach its potential future audience on Snapchat by showing more targeted stories that resonate with a younger crowd, like one about parents raising a transgender child, or another on young girls in India. But, crucially, CNN hasn’t limited its storytelling to teen or millennial-focused stuff. “Stories on ISIS, for example, do extremely well,” adds Sam Barry, who runs CNN's social media.
So in a world in which news institutions, like the Times and CNN, are already invading the social arenas where young news consumers click, share, and play, what's a young millennial niche site to do? Fusion, another new media site hoping to reach this desirable demographic, is banking on a slightly different answer: diversity.
Fusion, for its part, isn’t just trying to be young, hip, and new. It doesn't think the answer is hiring millennial reporters or crafting the most shareable data-backed hits. The young generation is more diverse than any before it, so Fusion tries to run stories that speak to that more diverse audience. Recent headlines include stories like, "On passing, wishing for darker skin, and finding your people: A conversation between two mulattos" and "What not to do when covering a woman running for President."
But there are questions about whether the hopeful upstart, which is owned by Univision and Disney/ABC, can grow its audience both online and on TV to seriously compete with older outposts. And admittedly, for Fusion, just like Mic and the others, the targeted branding---for the young, connected, changing generation---is weird. It’s not clear to this millennial that we are all that special. Researchers and columnists thought millennials wouldn’t buy cars or houses. And, now---big surprise---we are. Our news consumption may not end up being all that different either.
For young niche sites, the dream is a good one---be better, be different, be there. But that’s easier said than done---and every news organization knows these ideals, too. So, what do millennials want? It is simple: we want information and we want good stories, just like everyone else. As long as we can find them on our phones.
