Power to the Publications

First of all, elizabeth tobey, thank you for being the spearhead on what promises to be a valuable point of interaction between Medium’s staff and users. I’ve never been active on a website that seemed so dedicated to community engagement (shout out to Gabe Kleinman and Cara Meverden), and that new avenues through which to connect continue to open almost constantly is heartening to say the least.

Medium is a special place. Immediately upon discovering the site last year, I found myself drawn in by the community, made to feel immediately at home by the quality content and conversations I was finding here. Connections were made almost instantly upon my first few published stories, and I soon found that I wasn’t just shouting into the void, as I might be on a personal blog, but was reaching other content creators where they, too, were creating. A really cool example of my early use can be found here; after reading an entire serialized science fiction story, I felt compelled to respond to the author, Stephen C. Rose. I admit, I gushed a bit, but I was really thrilled with the exchange — Stephen was open and honest about his process, and I felt I learned something from his response.

(Also, you must check out the Plastic Suitcase Jihad. It’s pretty amazing.)

Medium has the uncanny ability to make connections between its users, and to turn those connections into great content. My early experiences with the phenomenon led me to start Panel & Frame, a publication dedicated to promoting the voices of independent, emerging creators of Comics, Literature, Art, and Film. Through the publication, I’ve met the extremely talented and generous Dave Salanitro, who has been working constantly with Alyssa Jeanné Witte and I to perfect the design elements of our first print issue. We’ve also made friends and companions of creative contributors like Mike Grossman, James S. Baker, Nicholas Laskin, Thaddeus Howze, Kelcie Mattson, and Vivian Winslow, just to name a very few. To be honest, our list of connections grows every day, and doesn’t seem to be slowing in its growth. All this in just a few months!

I’ve also seen what can be done with a publication with several years of dedicated curation. In December, Shawn White handed me the keys to The Synapse, a publication with three years of tender loving care poured into it (another case of Medium providing the space for valuable connections). Its 32 thousand subscribers speak for themselves, but more important than that are the conversations that tend to spring up naturally, the depth and breadth of the contributors’ voices, and the incredible reach of their thoughts. Talented, thoughtful writers like Matthew R. Morris, Karen Kilbane, Rusul Alrubail, Tim Monreal, Dan Ryder, and Mike Crowley (again, to name a very, very few) make the publication what it is, and I have the distinct pleasure of working with the content they produce.

In a sense, The Synapse represents everything Medium publications can be, in their current form. On occasion, it reaches audiences on a national scale. More often than not, it reaches a core base of daily active users. In both cases, it has something important to add to the conversation on education, and I’ve never published a piece I wasn’t proud to present under the publication’s heading. As an editor for both publications, I take personal pride in each article, and do whatever I can to publicize it, in hopes that it will reach the audience that needs it.

This is a long-winded way of saying that, most days, I feel like a Medium success story, and that I feel I have a solution in mind that can help others feel the way I do.

There’s a lot of talk on Medium about the flawed news feed, as well as the problems smaller writers can have reaching larger audiences. The power of the recommend, the importance of a large subscriber base, and the seemingly internet-wide obsession with godawful self-help listicles have all been the subject of popular articles (I especially like the productive nature of this one by A.H. Chu). I’ve read a great deal about adjusting algorithms, adding weight to certain kinds of recommends, and giving individual users more curation options for their news feeds. These may indeed be great starts towards getting more, better content in front of more users, but indulge me for a moment in my thought:

Medium’s greatest strength is the human touch that can be achieved through careful curation of a publication.

As a reader, I can appreciate the sense of discovery that comes from an endlessly scrolling wall of content on the news feed, but I can see where some people may find themselves baffled, turned off, or frustrated with the mass of unrelated stories. They came here to follow certain writers, tags, and publications- what’s all this other stuff? Who asked for this? Is that yet another article about the importance of coding? Is that yet another article about 10 things every productive person does?

An algorithm can’t filter for repetitiveness the way a human editor can. It can’t guarantee a level of quality, readability, and originality that a human editor can. It can’t plan awesome events, such as the current conversation on Criminal Justice Reform helmed by Elizabeth Tobey, or connect content on a through-line of subject matter based on a recent event, trend, or conversation.

Eventually, the programmers down at Medium may come up with an algorithm that can do all of that, but I don’t think they should. An algorithm without human input is a pretty meaningless thing. Instead, perhaps Medium can take steps to highlight the work being done behind the scenes to provide a reading experience on par with the best publications on the Internet.

Readers come to certain writers and publications with the expectation that they maintain a curated, well-edited voice throughout the body of their work, while providing a varied, meaningful spread of content related to certain subjects. For me, these expectations speak to almost all of the concerns I’ve seen repeatedly in popular discourse about Medium’s shortcomings.

Empower the Editors to edit, curate, and present; the user experience will benefit. Highlight the publications, and the news feed becomes a personalized reading experience with a human element between what is written and what is seen.

What does that empowerment look like? That’s for us to discuss. I don’t have a whole lot of answers, but I have a few spitballed ideas (what about an alternate newsfeed dedicated to followed or featured publications? Maybe the top of the newsfeed can have a series of publication “Covers” to be leafed through like a news stand?). Being published on Medium already carries with it the potential to be discovered by a whole new audience. I wonder what would happen if that potential were raised by the site’s very design.

I’m excited about the changes we can work together to come up with moving forward. In the interim, I am your humble editor.