Here’s the part where I weigh in. I’m Matter’s editor in chief, and I also edited
’s story about Airbnb.First off, some people seem surprised
saw ’s story before publication. Of course Ev saw the story before it was published. He wasn’t the only person at Medium to read it: our lawyers read it, my bosses read it, my fellow editors read it. It was a sensitive, difficult, important story, and it’s my job to properly vet sensitive, difficult, important stories.Everyone gave me their support; no one asked me to change anything. Actually, that’s not even the right way to describe it: No one can ask me for changes, because I’m the final word on what Matter assigns and publishes. But I like the advice of exceptionally smart people, which describes everyone at Medium, so I like to ask the advice of our staffers and my bosses. Sometimes I ask engineers for advice about Matter, too, though weirdly they never ask me for advice about code.
After looking at the draft,
did comment on the photo illustrations; he felt they distracted from the power of the story. He told me this was his opinion, and only that. He made clear the decision was always up to me and to Matter’s art director .Erich’s mandate at Matter is to create attention-getting, trend-setting, boundary-pushing, platform-breaking, emotion-provoking, idea-driving art, and he keeps doing it. He and his team have created puppet shows about Ebola and eerily beautiful illustrated gifs for a story about pedophilia, made drop caps out of butter and turned very NSFW sexts into works of art. For the Sex Ed series that recently ran inside our sister publication Bright, he commissioned a gif that would have made Georgia O’Keefe blush. He’s been nominated for a National Magazine Award for feature photography and for The Society of Publication Designer’s website of the year. What I’m saying is, he’s super-good at this.
Erich, our photo editor
, and I spent weeks discussing and debating and changing and fine-tuning the art-direction for the Airbnb story. We do aggressive work, but we want that work to be right and fitting and appropriate for the stories and ideas we publish. It’s especially hard when you’re dealing with such a unique story, this act of mourning and feat of reporting. We wanted a visual treatment that was beautiful but unsettling — images of domestic quiet that had gone uncannily amiss. The effect, we always knew, was going to be provocative and memorable and was going to make some people upset. One of those people, we knew too, was going to be our CEO.After the story went live,
made that discomfort public. I figured he would, frankly. Not because he wanted to undermine me or Matter, but because he respected me and my decisions enough to openly disagree with them. Still, what he wrote in his initial, too-brief response was more of a callback to our private conversations than a full expression of his genuine and thoughtful hesitations. By his own acknowledgement, it came off as flip, and it shouldn’t have happened in such proximity to Zak’s grief or readers’ sympathy. Not surprisingly, it upset a whole lot of people. Including some people here. Sample response to him right now on Medium: “Delete your account.”Here’s the thing I’m trying to get at: These are the sorts of disagreements that happen between people who support one another and challenge one another, and I don’t mind making them public. I can’t think of another publication or platform where an editor and his boss would have this exchange in front of everybody. The even-better news is that you can disagree with both of us. Just start typing in that response window below.
