How Fast Company reacted to being hacked

Brendan Vaughan, the editor in chief of Fast Company, writes about how the magazine responded to being hacked.

Vaughan writes, “We care deeply about fulfilling that mission. We also take seriously our commitments to advertisers, who seek to reach the audience we’ve built. To be sidelined for more than a week was a difficult experience for our team.

“That didn’t stop us from doing our jobs. After processing the shock of the attacks, we channeled that shock into action. When it became clear that our CMS would be down for a while, we asked ourselves: How else can we publish?

“Like many of our colleagues in media, we had already been increasing our focus on so-called zero-click content—articles and videos that live exclusively on social platforms, with no expectation that the user will click through to our site (but will hopefully subscribe to a newsletter or a podcast, and ultimately become loyal to Fast Company). So last Wednesday, we began to publish new articles on various platforms, starting with LinkedIn (our first article: the scoop that Everette Taylor had been named Kickstarter’s new CEO), and then on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and Medium. The following day, we launched Fast Company Daily, a LinkedIn newsletter that quickly reached 103,000 subscribers. When news broke that Elon Musk plans to buy Twitter after all, we covered it in real time via Twitter Spaces. It was all Fast Company, just not on our owned and operated site.”

Read more here.