MORE Thoughts on Bully Publishing: the New Medium Trend
Subverting readers and potential earnings away from Medium writers and pubs
I’ve been thinking about the events mentioned in my first essay. If the purpose of the condensed bully-published version of this article was to give it exposure, I’m not buying that. The article was doing just fine in the Our Human Family publication. Cocoa Griot’s original Underground Railroad article garnered upward of 4,000 claps. Kelli María Korducki, senior Medium editor and writer of the truncated and hijacked version, failed to include a link to the publication and more important to the writer. That’s a major oversight if the purpose of absconding with the article was to “give it exposure.”
Note: At our request, Medium has removed their bully-published version of Cocoa Griot’s story. Hopefully, they will make known their plans for remedying this situation so that the same thing doesn’t happen to other Medium writers in the future. — CR, February 20, 2021
What’s taken place is bald-faced plagiarism. I know it. Kelli María Korducki knows it. Adrienne Samuels Gibbs knows it. And the vast majority of Medium writers who are aware of this incident know it. (And I’m sure the decision-makers at Medium are aware of it as well, but one never knows.)
A look at Momentum’s About page reveals a stable of “industry” editors, writers, et al with access to all the Medium toys. Yet they chose to punch down at a smaller quality publication. This doesn’t make sense.
There seems to be little to no awareness of the situation writers are in. Many are professional writers, under-employed scribes, or have lost jobs/careers. They write on Medium as a means of earning supplemental income. Others are writing as a means of survival. For Momentum to subvert income from people who truly need whatever they can get is monstrous.
What happened yesterday isn’t an aberration, it’s a regular occurrence. Since publishing “Bully Publishing,” several writers have reached out to me and said, “…the same thing has happened to me.” So it seems that the practice of bully publishing doesn’t mean the system is broken. It means that bully publishing is a feature of Medium platform.
As the editor-in-chief of Our Human Family and on behalf of the writer of the original Underground Railroad article, I’d like to know what Medium plans to do about this? Wouldn’t you? Trust has been breached. Medium expects that writers will not publish plagiarized articles and poetry. The flipside of the coin is that writers expect Medium not to rip them off by diverting potential readership from their works. Or by other unscrupulous means, like suppressing readership.
Will Medium address this? Will there be an apology issued to Cocoa Griot the author of the original Underground Railroad article? Will there be a policy change? And what about other writers who’ve also experienced this treachery?
HOT TIP: The best thing Medium can do is to come out of hiding and address this head-on with its writers and editors and work to build trust with transparency . . . because right now what they’re doing and not doing isn’t working.
Silence reeks of apathy and complicity.