Medium and News Break

A few things I like and don’t like about both of them.

At least for now I like News Break’s payment system a whole hell of a lot more than Medium’s. Even if I were one of the fortunate writers to get Medium’s bonuses for the last two months (I wasn’t), at $1500 a month News Break still kicks Medium’s butt when it comes to earning cash for my writing.

But even with News Break’s fantastic payment system there are still some key things I feel it lacks that Medium has.

When it comes to writing I’m very good at tone, structure, plot, creating characters, and hooks. I’m terrible at editing. Which means I miss a lot of typos, spelling errors, grammatical mistakes, and punctuation like properly placed commas.

No Spell Check

Recently I’ve been cross posting a lot of my fly-fishing articles from News Break to Medium. When I cut and paste them from Newsbreak to Medium, I notice quickly how much I suck when it comes to writing clean prose. And to my horror that is how I discovered that News Break doesn’t have a built-in spell checker like Medium does.

This was after I had already published them on News Break. I’m not ready to invest in the pro version of Grammarly just yet, but I have written all my drafts for Newsbreak either in Medium or in Libre when I’m offline, from now on. It is just as easy to cut and paste from Medium to News Break as it is to cut and paste from News Break to Medium. And at least if I go from Medium to News Break my writing will be a lot cleaner than it would be the other way around.

Unsplash Pictures I’ve been writing on Medium since 2017, so I can remember the bad old days of searching out photos that were creative commons. Unsplash isn’t the only option for free photos you can use, but Medium sure makes it easy.

News Break? Not so much. Most of the time I end up using photos from Unsplash that I’ve already used with my Medium articles on News Break. Since I’ve already found them, can easily see the photographer’s name, and can upload them quicker, I use those rather than trying to search out something new for my News Break articles. It isn’t that much harder on Newsbreak really, but it takes several extra minutes, which I would much prefer to spend writing rather than searching out photos, downloading them, uploading them, and attributing them to the photographer.

Word Count

This is one thing, other than paying much better, that News Break does better than Medium. Sort of, that is. News Break wants all of your articles to be at least 600 words. At the bottom of the page they have a nifty little word counter built in so you can easily see exactly how many more words you have to go before you can kick that baby out of the nest and see if it flies you in another $25 to $60 or if it crashes into Rejection Land.

You can check your word count in Medium if you highlight everything, but this feels so much clunkier than the simple and clean auto word counter Newsbreak uses.

Those are a few of the differences I have noticed between Medium and News Break at least when it comes to actually writing. I didn’t mention Vocal this time, but are some differences between that platform and these two that I might write about in the future.