Change to the Medium editorial team today

We announced a buyout and leadership change to the Medium editorial team today. Below is the email I sent to the company. We are making some changes to our editorial strategy and leadership and giving a voluntary exit option to employees who would like to take a different path. Details on these changes were announced to the editorial team this afternoon. This email is to share this news more widely and give some context.
First, the context:
https://www.geogebra.org/m/rwnfbxqn
https://www.geogebra.org/m/vd2cmmgr
https://www.geogebra.org/m/vmrqzp3f
https://www.geogebra.org/m/hnhv92fd
https://www.geogebra.org/m/zk2n3edk
https://www.geogebra.org/m/k5bzg6cm
https://www.geogebra.org/m/qxxw7jch
https://www.geogebra.org/m/ffmf8nd4
https://www.geogebra.org/m/ac47e6bq
https://www.geogebra.org/m/zbh3cxwj

Though Medium has been an open platform since day one, we’ve had an editorial team almost as long. The original thesis was that we wanted to establish that Medium was both open and high quality. We wanted to set the bar high. We were successful in doing that, and, since then, the editorial part of our company has gone through many iterations as we’ve strived to find the right way to integrate it. In 2014–16, we published great original content but we didn’t have the right business model to support it.
In 2018, we saw promising signs. Our subscriber base was growing quickly, and it was supporting increasing amounts of platform and professional content. I brought on Siobhan O’Connor to organize and uplevel the then-tiny editorial team. The work they did found an eager audience on the platform, which now had a business model to support it.

This led to our decision in 2019 to double down on this strategy and ramp up our editorial efforts. We decided to do that in the context of our own publications. We launched our first one, OneZero, just over two years ago. The speed at which we ramped up from there was ambitious — launching seven magazine-style pubs within nine months, with a team of about 80 by year’s end. The work this team did, and the speed with which they did it, was impressive and groundbreaking. They defined new brands, developed their voices from scratch, commissioned, fact-checked, illustrated, and edited thousands of stories, broke news, and won awards.
I was very happy to have this team in place when COVID hit a year ago. Because of Siobhan’s background in health journalism and our science-backed health publication, Elemental, we had the staff in place to not only report but to curate the platform during this critical time. That was just one of the examples we’ve seen of how professional editors in combination with an open platform can equal more than the sum of the parts. Another was when anti-Black racism became the national focus last summer. I was proud that we had already been investing in Black voices, specifically with Zora and Level. Though hard to quantify, it seems likely that many individuals chose Medium to share their thoughts on those issues because we had been carving out a space for those communities.

Our goal was never to replicate the traditional publishing model because we saw the challenges the industry was going through. Rather, we believed we could find a new model that would allow professional writers and editors to do their best work. One of our key innovations is what we now call Amplify, our program through which we offer editorial polish and a spotlight for writers who come in through the platform. This has worked really well.

https://266948.8b.io
https://266929.8b.io
https://266986.8b.io
https://267009.8b.io
https://267017.8b.io
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https://267767.8b.io
https://267774.8b.io
https://267784.8b.io

What’s worked less well is where we’ve followed the traditional editorial playbook — specifically, commissioning stories from professional writers into publications with broad mandates. When I say “worked less well,” I don’t mean the work itself, but the equation of cost, audience, and return on investment. I also mean in aggregate. We have published many stellar stories that found a wide audience and more than paid for themselves. But our hit rate has been low, and we’re not near where we need to be to make it work economically.

To be clear, we had no illusion these publications were going to pay for themselves in the short term. The bet was that we could develop these brands, and they would develop loyal audiences that would grow the overall Medium subscriber base. What’s happened, though, is the Medium subscriber base has continued to grow, while our publication’s audiences haven’t. There are many potential reasons for this, which we could debate.

https://www.metooo.io/e/gleday-kruela-2021-filmi-onlayn-bezplatno-bg-audio-striyming
https://www.metooo.io/e/gleday-tom-i-dzheri-2021-filmi-onlayn-bezplatno-bg-audio-striyming
https://www.metooo.io/e/gleday-godzila-sreshchu-kong-2021-filmi-onlayn-bezplatno-bg-audio-striyming
https://www.metooo.io/e/gleday-ligata-na-spravedlivostta-na-zak-snaydr-2021-filmi-onlayn-bezplatno-bg-audio
https://www.metooo.io/e/gleday-raya-i-posledniyat-drakon-2021-filmi-onlayn-bezplatno-bg-audio-striyming
https://www.metooo.io/e/gleday-malkite-neshcha-2021-filmi-onlayn-bezplatno-bg-audio-striyming
https://www.metooo.io/e/gleday-zhenata-chudo-1984-2020-filmi-onlayn-bezplatno-bg-audio-striyming
https://www.metooo.io/e/gleday-dvete-strani-na-chudesata-2020-filmi-onlayn-bezplatno-bg-audio-striyming
https://www.metooo.io/e/gleday-zemya-na-nomadi-2020-filmi-onlayn-bezplatno-bg-audio-striyming

I think a significant factor is that the role of publications — in the world, not just on Medium — has decreased in the modern era. I don’t mean the role of professional editorial, but the idea of an imprimatur that establishes credibility or trust. Trust is more important than ever and well-established editorial brands still have meaning. But today, credibility and affinity are primarily built by people — individual voices — rather than brands. In fact, that describes the vast majority of what people read on Medium and is in line with our Relational strategy.