The Above The Fray Mission Statement
Rejected stories need love too
Six years on Medium have shown me nothing is certain except change. The Boost Pilot Program has been one of the best ideas they’ve had for writers, but it’s not without its flaws.
I’m not here to disparage the program. As maddening as Medium can be, it’s still the only platform that does what it does. The Boost highlights the best of the best — based on the opinion of a team of curators.
The problem is that nominated stories that don’t receive a boost get little to no reads. It’s demoralizing for the nominator and the writer. If an editor/nominator thought the piece was worthy of a nomination, it must have been pretty damn good.
To be an editor on Medium is basically to work for free. As an editor, you are free to remove yourself a bit from the emotions of a story and focus on the mechanics of it. You still need to help the writer make it a good story, but you don’t need to invest as much emotionally.
As a Boost nominator, however, you really have to read the story. You have to feel it and understand it, and then you have to pitch it to the Medium curators. To go through all this, and then have a piece rejected for a Boost, is demoralizing.
