The Skimm was created to be an easily accessible platform to gather clear, concise news of the day. CEOs Carly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg created the idea after becoming infatuated with the news when their other friends weren’t. The concept gained traction after Today Show anchor Hoda Kotb shared about it on air after receiving a cold email about the platform.
The idea took off and now there are 7 million people (largely women) who check the network daily – where they rely on the Skimms’ mission: to make it easier to live smarter. But with so many people absorbing the information they curate, they’ve learned that they have a responsibility to provide quality, thought provoking content.
An article with The Cut muses, “By any measure, the Skimm, founded in 2012, is an insane success. The newsletter is a Frankensteining of clear, sober-minded news aggregation with a tone imitating the way young women supposedly talk to one another. It has grown by more than 100 percent since Donald Trump took office and has 7 million subscribers, twice as many as the New York Times.” Yes, the platform has critics but its working hard to deliver you news in a way that your straight forward, intelligent, tell-it-like-it-is best friend would.
It a pioneering product and it has taken off, rewriting the rules on how we once believed the news should be delivered to us. The article ends with a profound statement on how the Skimm can help facilitate a paradigm shift in our news landscape, “A thoughtful, stylish woman I know in her 40s said to me that she hopes the Skimm continues to be dominant — and that they start to subtly elevate the way they write, just a hair at a time, changing it so slowly that no one even realizes it’s changing. “Imagine what that could do,” she said, “if we started talking to women not in same the way that we’ve always thought that we had to in order to get their attention.” For us at milk*, there is nothing better than a creative and dynamic company owning their identity and trailblazing important work in the industry.