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Business Executives, Celebrities, and Major Announcements Made on Medium (Updated Monthly)

List of Influential Medium Posts

Medium is an amazing publishing platform because it enables anyone to write insightful articles and share them easily online. While much of the emphasis has been on new, emerging writers and underrepresented voices (both extremely important), there have also been a number of Medium posts, written by business executives, celebrities, whistle-blowers at prominent companies, and politicians who are looking to communicate directly with Medium's audience. There have even been some battles between journalists, on Medium, that have proved fascinating reads.

Below is a list of some of these articles. It is by no means exhaustive, and if you have any suggestions for additional articles for this list, please write a comment below. I intend to keep this list updated at least monthly, like some of the other articles in Blogging Guide, my Medium Tips and tricks publication.

This list of articles is important because it marks milestones in Medium’s journey to become the go to place for readers and writers. It also contains some interesting articles that I found fascinating and were uncovered when doing research on Medium’s history and the qualities of viral writing.

Jeff Bezos — No thank you, Mr. Pecker

This is probably one of the single most important articles in terms of putting Medium “on the map” for readers who had not heard of the platform. Not only was it an explosive post ( publicly accuse lawyers from the parent company of the National Enquirer of blackmail and extortion), but the decision to use Medium to disseminate this was a noteworthy choice because Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post.

Amanda Knox — Your Content, My Life

Chloe Dykstra — Rose Colored Glasses: A Confession

Chloe Dykstra detailed years of sexual and emotional abuse in a personal essay posted on Medium. She didn’t name her abuser, but the details she included led many people to believe it could be Chris Hardwick, who Dykstra was in a relationship with between 2012 and 2014. In the essay, Dykstra says she experienced suicidal thoughts, routine sexual assault, anorexia, and a terminated pregnancy. She also said her abuser sought to get her fired from the companies she worked with after they broke up

Bob Casey — Why I changed on guns and why Congress should too

James Brindle — Something is wrong on the internet

The piece, by tech writer James Bridle, was published on the heels of a report from the New York Times that described disquieting problems with the popular YouTube Kids app. Parents have been handing their children an iPad to watch videos of Peppa Pig or Elsa from “Frozen,” only for the supposedly family-friendly platform to offer up some disturbing versions of the same. In clips camouflaged among more benign videos, Peppa drinks bleach instead of naming vegetables. Elsa might appear as a gore-covered zombie or even in a sexually compromising position with Spider-Man.

Talia Jane — An Open Letter to My Ceo

Talia Jane, a 25-year-old former Yelp employee, wanted to start a conversation about living on minimum wage in Silicon Valley. But she didn’t hit the nerve she was aiming for.

Her open letter to Yelp’s CEO — a letter that got her fired — restarted the endless debate over whether millennials face a particularly tough time in the job market or whether they’re just more likely to complain about it online.

Anonymous — I am an Uber survivor

This post describes an office culture in which members of an almost entirely male staff are routinely and openly hostile to female employees, from instances of verbal abuse and belittlement to job-based “blackmail” by HR and extensive sexual harassment. Among other things, the author, who identifies herself as a former employee and “survivor” of Uber’s San Francisco headquarters, recalls being suggestively coached on her appearance by her manager, his frequent use of striking racial slurs and his disparagement of business “ethics.” The author also described a habit among male employees of creating sexually explicit narratives about female peers and superiors in online group chats.

The anonymous post also describes a chaotic management style under which employees have little power over their projects, or over their treatment by supervisors. “Deadlines were set without any justification and we were expected to meet them at any cost,” the author wrote. “[CEO Travis Kalanick] is well known to protect high-performing team leaders no matter how abusive they are towards their employees. The HR team was known to be deftly afraid of Travis’s tendency to blame and ridicule the women and yell at HR whenever they went in with complaints of abuse.”

Amazon — New York Times Battle

In an unusually public tussle over a prominent article, a senior executive from Amazon and the top editor of The New York Times clashed on Monday over the details in a Times article about the Internet retailer’s work culture.

The debate began early on Monday when Jay Carney, a senior vice president for global corporate affairs at Amazon, posted a 1,300-word essay, accusing The New York Times of omitting information that he said would have undercut an August article that painted a bruising portrait of life as an Amazon employee.

Several hours later, Dean Baquet, The Times’s executive editor, published his own 1,300-word response to Mr. Carney in which he defended the reporting behind the article. Mr. Carney got in the last word for the day with his own shorter response to Mr. Baquet’s response.

It was the kind of sparring between a newspaper and the subject of an article that once might have taken place in private. Instead, both men, who have access to huge audiences of their own, published their posts on Medium, a site for essays and storytelling that is open to the public.

This story articulates how Julia Cheiffetz was wooed by Amazon after serving as Senior Editor at HarperCollins.

It was a big opportunity, one many people inside the publishing industry told me privately I would be crazy not to take. I was drawn to Amazon’s spirit of innovation, its agility, and its culture of excellence.

Jumping at the job, she was “dazzled” by those she met, adapting to what the Times had corroborated as a lightning-fast, intense workplace. She also noted that at the executive level, it seemed dominated by men.

Things went well until her second year, when Cheiffetz had her first child and a cancer diagnosis soon followed. During her five-month leave, Amazon had neglectfully lapsed her insurance coverage, leaving her to rely on her husband’s insurance for treatment.

When she returned, she expected to get right back to her work. She did not:

I was taken to lunch by a woman I barely knew. Over Cobb salad she calmly explained that all but one of my direct reports — the people I had hired — were now reporting to her. In the months that followed, I was placed on a dubious performance improvement plan, or PIP, a signal at Amazon that your employment is at risk. Not long after that I resigned.

The “Performance Improvement Plan” is the dubious and conniving mechanic The Times described in its story as well. It seems women at Amazon in particular are subjected to greater performance scrutiny during childbearing years or times of disaster — which often lead to resignation. In Cheiffetz’s case, the double-whammy of maternity leave and cancer were enough to knock her out of the workforce at Amazon.

Brian Chesky— Don’t Fuck up the Culture

• Airbnb co-founder Brain Chesky shares his email that he sent to his entire team triggered by advice from Peter Thiel after they closed their Series C round. The most significant risk, according to Thiel that companies face is fucking up the culture particularly when they scale. Chesky explains Culture is built into your core values and can be seen in everything you do from writing an email to hiring a new team member.

Geraldine DeRuiter — I Made the Pizza Cinnamon Roles from Mario Batali’s sexual misconduct apology letter

Back in December, when Eater broke the story of Mario Batali’s alleged sexual misconduct, action was swift. Within a few hours, Batali’s products were removed from the shelves at Eataly, and by the end of the week, he was fired from The Chew. Batali also soon issued an apology of sorts, followed, inexplicably, by a recipe for cinnamon rolls.

While many were offended and confused by the inclusion of a “holiday-inspired breakfast” (seriously, imagine making Batali’s cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning in 2017), writer Geraldine DeRuiter took it a step further and actually made the recipe. The resulting piece, “I Made the Pizza Cinnamon Rolls from Mario Batali’s Sexual Misconduct Apology Letter,” was both a hilarious take-down of the apology and the recipe itself as well as a chance for DeRuiter to talk about her own experiences with sexual harassment. It was also at turns hilarious, painful, and scathing.

Obama White House — President Obama’s State of the Union address

From The Washington Post:

Newish publishing platform Medium scored a coup yesterday evening when the White House published President Obama’s prepared State of the Union remarks to the site not long before the speech got underway. A tweet from the White House account directed folks to the document:

President Obama’s State of the Union address as prepared for delivery: http://t.co/6SeDx1lqez #SOTU pic.twitter.com/TMmVXUp8V9

— White House Archived (@ObamaWhiteHouse) January 21, 2015

Joshua Hammer I Don’t Know if I’m Already Infected

Joshua Hammer started his foreign correspondent’s life as a rotating bureau chief for Newsweek from 1992 to 2006. He’s now a contributing editor to Smithsonian and Outside magazines, and contributes frequently to the New York Review of Books. He’s written for The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, among others. He was also a 2005 Nieman Fellow.

Despite these glossy magazine chops, the story that earned Hammer the 2016 National Magazine Award for Reporting appeared in Matter, a digital-only publisher of longform journalism. The piece, “My Nurses Are Dead and I Don’t Know If I’m Already Infected,” tells the story of Dr. Sheik Humarr Khan, a Sierra Leonean physician and tropical diseases specialist, who led the effort to control the Ebola outbreak from the country’s Kenema Government Hospital, in the heart of the disease’s hot zone. Hammer says winning the ASME (American Society of Magazine Editors) award surprised him, in part because when he wrote the story, he wasn’t sure what kind of visibility Matter would have. But he loved Matter’s openness to a long piece (it eventually ran at 9,000 words). That gave him the opportunity to both profile what motivates people to take heroic action while facing almost certain death, and to fully explore controversial questions about the conduct of government officials and aid organizations.

Bonus Article!

What I believe is Medium’s first quiz. And a good one at that. This doesn’t really meet the criteria of the other article’s above but it is too awesome not to include.

— Casey Botticello

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Casey Botticello is a partner at Black Edge Consulting. Black Edge Consulting is a strategic communications firm, specializing in online reputation management, digital marketing, and crisis management. Prior to founding Black Edge Consulting, he worked for BGR Group, a bipartisan lobbying and strategic communications firm.

Casey is the founder of the Cryptocurrency Alliance, an independent expenditure-only committee (Super PAC) dedicated to cryptocurrency and blockchain advocacy. He is also the editor of several Medium publications, including Medium Blogging Guide, Investigation, Strategic Communications, K Street, and Escaping the 9 to 5. He is a graduate of The University of Pennsylvania, where he received his B.A. in Urban Studies.