Mic CEO Chris Altchek Says Millennials Need a Different Type of News
“It’s hard to build trust amongst this generation. They’re super skeptical, very upset with older generations.”
Amelia Krales for Re/code
There are 80 million millennials in America. How can they be made to care about the news?
28-year-old Mic CEO Chris Altchek says the answer is tearing down our assumptions of what the news is and rebuilding it with those young folks in mind. He explained how Mic is doing that — and reaching 30 million readers a month — in an interview with Peter Kafka on the latest episode of “Re/code Decode.”
“It’s hard to build trust amongst this generation,” Altchek said. “They’re super skeptical, very upset with older generations, not in tune with what’s happening in cable news or print news.”
Altchek also discussed how Mic scaled up from just two employees to 125 and the future of media distribution as platforms like Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter continue to duke it out.
“You should expect meaningful changes in distribution for the next few years,” he said. “None of these platforms have settled.”
Listen to or download the episode in the player above, or click here to subscribe to “Re/code Decode” on iTunes. Kara Swisher will be in this space on Monday to talk with Affirm CEO Max Levchin, and Peter Kafka will be back next Thursday.
But wait, there’s more! We’re launching a new podcast tomorrow: “Too Embarrassed to Ask.” It’s a bigger and better version of Lauren Goode and Kara Swisher’s weekly Q&A segment from “Re/code Decode.” On the first episode, Lauren and Kara are joined by Casey Newton from The Verge to talk about everything that happened at CES and the new social app Peach. Click here to subscribe to the new show on iTunes right now.
And if you like this show, you should also check out “Re/code Replay,” an archive of audio content from our events and interviews by Kara Swisher, Walt Mossberg, Peter Kafka, Ina Fried and more. To subscribe to that, click right here.
You can follow @Recode on Twitter for the latest on upcoming guests.
If you like what we’re doing, please write a review on iTunes — and if you don’t, just tweet-strafe Kara and Peter. You can also suggest guests for the show on Twitter and we’ll do our best to nab them for a Red Chair interview.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
