Nuked Last week, a partnerships manager at medium found that President Joe Biden was being served porn. The White House found that there was a strange problem with the platform.
Biden, who had used medium as a campaign blog in 2020, was in a video conference with a White House staffer to discuss how he could begin posting to the official medium @ POTUS account.
The medium staffer followed political topics while logged in as the president. He’read’ posts by President Obama and vice president Kamala Harris. When he refreshed his recommendations, medium recommended another piece of erotica.
The employee previously found that medium had added Biden as a writer on 10’garbage publications’, as well as at least one software development blog.’President Joe Biden is being served erotica on Medium.com,’ the employee said.
A publishing platform used by the most powerful people in the world. An experiment in mixing highbrow and lowbrow in hopes a sustainable business would emerge.
Billionaire medium founder Ev Williams offered buyouts to all of its roughly 75 editorial employees. The company was founded by the billionaire medium in 2011.
‘our hit rate has been low, and we’re not near where we need to be to make it work economically’.
Medium entered the year with more than 700,000 paid subscriptions. It put it on track for more than $ 35 million in revenue. Williams previously sold blogger to Google and co-founded Twitter.
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.
Jeff Bezos used medium to talk about the time he got blackmailed. The platform has grown to include writing of every kind.
Eleven owned publications covered food, design, business, politics, and other subjects. The soft paywall costs $ 5 a month or $ 50 a year.
The company laid off 50 journalists in 2015 amid a pivot away from advertising on the site. Williams then moved to wind down the experiment, throwing dozens of journalists’ livelihoods into question.
The voluntary buyout reflects changes we’re making to our editorial team to create a more flexible organization that focuses on both.’we see a real opportunity within our editorial operation to continue developing our model and to elevate the value we provide to our readers and writers,’ said medium.
Interviews with 14 current and former medium employees over the past day paint a portrait of a dysfunctional company built to celebrate writing. The company became famous for its poor treatment of writers.
In recent weeks, medium’s chief operating officer and vice president of engineering left the company. Williams is now the company’s CEO, de facto COO, and since last year, its head of product.
Medium’s renewed push into original journalism in 2018 was welcomed with optimism by reporters and editors who were hired to build the project out. One editor described how the joy at being told they could pay freelancers $ 1 a word – more than they had been able to pay at previous jobs.
The CEO of a tech company backed by SoftBank had once been a neo-Nazi, leading to the CEO’s departure from the company.’the Zora Canon,’ a list of the best books written by African American women, earned coverage everywhere from NPR to the New York Public Library.
Journalism was rarely at the center of the company’s marketing efforts. Employees expressed frustration that the company did so little to promote their work publications often had only skeletal branding or visual design.
Medium’s push into journalism represented a significant investment. But individual publications often got little attention – and what resources they did get began shrinking within months.
Most of Zora’s readers look like Williams. 71 percent are white, 55 percent are male, and 53 percent make more than $ 100,000 a year. Employees had pushed for improved diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace.
Staffers believed it would take both significant promotion and time to reach audiences outside medium’s mostly white Silicon Valley core. But in the end they would receive neither.
Editors who were lured to medium on the promise of being able to build out full-fledged publications were begging for enough money to pay for a handful of freelance stories a week. Last year, paid subscriptions, which had been on the rise, flatlined in 2020.
‘amplify’ program has become a core pillar of Williams’ vision for the future. Instead of paying full-time salaries and benefits to staff, Williams can use amplify to get the content he wants at a fraction of the cost.
Amplify’s writers are paid a small and essentially random fraction of subscription revenue. In practice the program pays almost no one a living wage. A venture capitalist bragged to me that he had made $ 25,000 on amplify over the past 11 months.
Medium would pay advances to high-profile writers including the New Yorker’s Susan Orlean and antitrust crusader Tim Wu to encourage them to post regularly on the platform. As with its journalism, medium did not market the program’s existence or the writing of the participants.
Williams’ investment in amplify and Hopscotch reflected a growing interest in’one-on-one relationships between readers and writers’.’the role of publications – in the world, not just on medium – has decreased in the modern era,’ Williams said.
Williams took the initiative personally, colleagues said. He believed that a union would make the company less nimble and effective as it worked to become sustainable.
Medium’s journalism was not converting free readers to paid subscribers. Random stories on the digital content farm that had sprung up around its high-gloss publications.
People were largely not finding stories from journalists or even from medium’s own recommendation algorithms, which were ineffective in predictably driving traffic. Staffers said medium’s traffic success came from search engines and social networks.
‘something made it big on Facebook,’ says a former employee who worked on the tech platform.’we managed to get a prime spot on Google,’ he said.
Medium went back to 2012 to create a’Halo’ around user-generated content. By the end of 2020, the journalism did n’t feel like a halo – it felt like an albatross.
Employees had gotten mixed messages about which metrics they should use to evaluate their own performance. Often they were told not to think about any of it. Many of the journalists got mixed messages.
‘they believed if you write it, they will come,’ one employee told me.’and it never worked that way’.
Medium is far from the only company to tell journalists to ignore traffic from their stories while managers monitor it in the background. Journalists were confused about how they, or their publications, would ultimately be judged – leaving them vulnerable to being blindsided when the end finally came.
Williams, the company’s 48-year-old CEO, is one of the few constants at the company since its founding. Employees say responsibility for the events of the past year belonged to Williams.
Digital culture magazine Mel laid off its entire staff today. Just today, digital culture publication Mel laid them off. The company is notoriously difficult.
Medium’s core technology platform 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.
A skeleton crew of editors will likely be kept on to promote user-generated posts to the relevant sites. What once had been publications are now likely better thought of as topic pages.
The acquisition of Glose is intended to create a bigger library of’evergreen’ content on medium that will drive more traffic to the site via search engines. The company will continue to rely on Google and Facebook traffic to generate hits it can convert into paid subscribers.
Williams would publicly claim some responsibility for his part in the chaos. Instead, he points to changes in the industry and says what can you do?.
But of the employees who remain, few are buying it, says Bob Greene. He says of those who remain few are purchasing it.
‘at a certain point you’re not nimble and iterating,’ one said.’you’re just floundering and failing to follow through and execute,’ he said.
