Introducing Mic in AMP stories

Publisher open-sources its template to easily manage and transform articles into different formats

Today, Mic announces its participation in the launch of AMP stories, a new, mobile-first, tap-through story format to be consumed quickly as a part of the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project led by Google. Starting today, if you’re searching for something on Google, your results may include a selection of “Visual Stories.” As one of the leading visual journalism companies, Mic will be producing daily AMP stories reflective of Mic’s core beats in social justice, politics, women’s rights, adventure, technology, personal finance and more. Check out a few examples from your mobile device here.

Mic will report, research and design stories specifically for the AMP stories format, as well as bringing together past written and video work into this unique form. Reporters, designers, producers and copy editors will work together to publish creative evergreen features, in-depth explainers and fast-turn breaking news. Production of AMP stories has been embedded across the newsroom, allowing for efficient production and a diverse range of storytelling.

AMP stories provide a format rich for creators, an opportunity for more ambitious storytelling and great potential to more deeply engage users through visuals. In a byline from Mic’s publisher, Cory Haik, last year, she predicted a “visual revolution” in journalism driven by visual storytelling, hypothesizing that “the new mixed-media formats in social video offer a rich opportunity to deliver complicated news in compelling ways.” Google’s AMP stories are very much a manifestation of Haik’s thesis, and they have the potential to transform the traditional conception of how journalism is constructed.

How the Mic newsroom creates AMP stories

AMP stories represent a new class of editorial product, calling for a dedicated set of design principles. When producing AMP stories, the Mic team choose stories that require visuals to be told most effectively and aim to minimize text per page. The team facilitates (and enforces) these principles in a proprietary WYSIWYG AMP story-builder called “Story CMS.” Story CMS was built to allow anyone in the newsroom – with any skillset – to make awesome AMP stories easily. The team also created a developer-friendly, platform-agnostic format with which to read and write AMP stories, which we call Story JSON. More on this next week.

For more on Mic’s principles for AMP story creation, read the Product team’s Medium post here.

Viewing Mic’s AMP stories

Here are a few specific examples of Mic’s AMP stories to check out on your mobile device:

The truly bizarre history of false eyelashes

View more from Google on AMP stories here.