Is This the Death of Medium Owned Pubs?
Medium is making another big shift — and it might benefit you greatly
If you’ve been around the platform for a while, you’ll know there’s 2 things Medium is famous for:
- They’re constantly making changes in the background
- Their communication of those changes is often…less than to be desired
But today I was pleasantly surprised to see something quite off-kilter — and from the CEO of Medium no less.
Ev Williams released a pretty hefty letter he sent to all of his employees about some big changes happening in the platform.
What’s the deal?
Well, if you were around about a year ago, Medium was in the middle of promoting their platform-owned publications.
These are ones like Elemental, Forge, Marker, and several others. You used to easily be able to tell which ones they owned because they were permanently linked at the top of the homepage.
And for a couple of months after they launched — they were almost exclusively the only promoted content on the feed. That annoyed a lot of writers to no end, of course.
After a lot of complaints — and a lot of followers built on the publications — they went back to a ‘normal’ distribution of recommended articles.
But nowadays you don’t see the permanent links at the top of the homepage. You still occasionally see articles recommended from one of those pubs — but it’s way less in frequency.
And after reading Ev’s letter, we now know why.
What are the changes?
For a while now, Medium has run an internal program called “Amplify” where they highlight, support, and promote independent authors.
I’ve never really heard of it (hint: I was never a Chosen One), but it certainly sounds pretty cool.
I even found a big official write-up they did on the program here — check it out.
Anyway, it seems that Ev and some of his management team have decided the Amplify program is now the future.
Previously, their massive editorial team of over 80 staff would mostly hire external professional writers to create their content. Ev talks about how this produced some outstanding work, but the cost-benefit just wasn’t there.
So, they’re moving slowly away from that and towards amplifying independent writers.
Maybe that could be you? Let’s hope so.
Why the letter?
It seems not everyone was happy with this plan, which is completely understandable.
Medium is once again moving away from operating like a traditional news publisher and staff that may prefer that culture of doing things probably don’t want to stay on.
So it looks like they’re getting a 5-month buyout package as an option, which is decently generous. The other big news was the VP of editorial, Siobhan O’Connor, has decided to leave, presumably as a result of the change in direction.
I wonder if this was a move to get out in front of a potential leak, but the content of it isn’t really bad, so I’m not sure if that’s the case. Anyway, it’s nice to see a step towards more transparency from our platform of choice.
What does it mean for you?
I personally think this will be a good thing for us. Especially you writers who actually know how to write.
In Ev’s own words:
“For the foreseeable future, we will focus that talent on supporting independent voices on our platform. This means identifying writers — both already on Medium and not — and offering them deals, support, editing, and feedback to help them tell great stories and find their audience.”
That sounds pretty great to me.
As for what kind of stories and articles they’re looking for?
Well, these two interviews with Medium ‘elevators’ — 4 people who choose which writers to promote — can shed some light on it.
So, get your thinking hat on, aim for quality over quantity, and go write your best damn piece on why peanut butter tuna sandwiches are the biggest thing since sliced breadnuts.
Yes, that’s a real thing.
Mmm. Breadnuts.
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