The mess at Medium
Casey Newton writing on Platformer has an interesting take on the changes Medium is making to its editorial staff.
In a blog post, billionaire Medium founder Ev Williams announced the latest pivot for the nearly nine-year old company. Just over two years into an effort to create a subscription-based bundle of publications committed to high-quality original journalism — and in the immediate aftermath of a bruising labor battle that had seen its workers fall one vote short of forming a union — Williams offered buyouts to all of its roughly 75 editorial employees.
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Medium has raised $132 million in venture capital, but its last funding came in 2016. Williams has been funding the company out of his own pocket since then, sources said.
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But in the end, frustrated that Medium staff journalists’ stories weren’t converting more free readers to paid ones, Williams moved to wind down the experiment — throwing dozens of journalists’ livelihoods into question, just as he had in 2015, when he laid off 50 people amid a pivot away from advertising on the site. (This 2019 history of the company by Laura Hazard Owen in Nieman Lab offers a definitive look at the company’s stop-start relationship with journalism up to that point.)
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Instead, like most publications in the platform era, Medium’s traffic successes came from search engines and social networks.
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Staffers who worked on Medium’s core technology platform generally had less positive things to say. Williams was prone to change his mind often, seemingly on a whim, they said, making software development difficult. The product roadmap over the years looks like a series of blind alleys: in 2019, a take on Snapchat stories; last June, a refreshed newsletter platform; in January, an acquisition of an e-book publisher.
