Want to See Specific Niche Stories in a Publication?

An easy way to do it and a useful list to get you started

I like to explore many different subjects in my writing — both to learn and to discover great writers that are new to me! However, I sometimes find that searching and exploring on Medium can get a bit tedious.

Luckily, the other day I stumbled upon a nice “hack” (as the kids say). I thought I’d share it with you.

Exploring

Often the best and most popular work is to be found the larger publications on this platform — places like The Startup, PSILY, Post Grad Survival Guide, and Better Marketing.

So, publications are great places to start when exploring different subjects you’re interested in reading or writing about. Sometimes, it’s better to find stories tagged with specific subjects inside those big publications.

Note: For those that want to explore a huge list of some of the best publications, I spent a lot of time making this useful article a few months ago:

Let’s say you wanted to see all the “humor” articles on The Startup. The Startup is the biggest pub on Medium with 610,000 followers and probably tens of thousands of posts. Surely they will have articles of many varieties, even humor.

But if you go to their homepage, you only see these categories:

Simple is often beautiful but in this case, we want to explore damn it!

So, here’s the tip: Go up to the web address bar, which right now looks like this:

medium.com/swlh

Now, if we want to look up all the posts tagged with “humor”, we simply add “/tagged/humor” to the end of the URL:

medium.com/swlh/tagged/humor

This will then take us to a juicy page full of all the “humor” articles on The Startup. It looks like this:

All articles on The Startup that were published with the tag “humor” are listed in chronological order.

Note: Congratulations to Jessica Wildfire for randomly winning the first place in today’s chronological order contest! (It’s an amazing article too!)

So: “/tagged/XYZ” has every single article with the “XYZ” tag.

Unfortunately, there’s no sorting available. It’s completely based on the time of publication. But that’s okay, you’re probably good at scrolling by now if you’re into this whole blogging thing!

Tags

What tags would you be interested in? Well, if you’re exploring a new area, there are a couple of tricks to finding related tags.

The first and easiest is just looking in the Medium search bar.

Let’s say I was interested in humor but didn’t know what to search for yet. Off the topic of my head, I might write write “funny.”

That would take you to a search page with related articles to “funny.” More importantly, on the right side of that page, it will list all the related tags — and you can click them!

There’s that humor tag we need. But hey, I never even thought of “Satire,” “Comedy,” or “Comics,”. That gives me some great places to start searching, both within publications and on the platform.

Another cool way to search for tags is the “Top Writer” tags. These are a list of writers that Medium deems to be important in specific subjects.

Here’s a handy little article explaining them and showing all 73 of the top writer tags!

Takeaway

I hope you found the above tips useful for your Medium searching and writing! The best part is you might be surprised to find niche content in publications normally unrelated to it.

Who knows, maybe your article “A Guide to Artisinal Oatmeal” could up in Elemental after all?

Happy writing everybody!