Meta Medium
Why Boost Pitching Makes a Sham Out of Medium’s “Better Internet” Ideals
How to judge a book by its cover
Pitching elevates the book cover and the blurb rather than the substance of the writing.
Don’t judge a book by its cover
I hate boost pitching, I’ve made no secret of it in front of my fellow boost nominators, and may even have mentioned it to Tony Stubblebine himself.
It’s not that I hate pitching per se, I make part of my living pitching copy I’ve written for clients and I’m good at it. But Medium isn’t my day job, it’s where I spend my get-away-from-my-day-job time.
Nor is it the ramshackle DIY nature of the boost system itself — a web-form with a tiny space for pitch text, no acknowledgement of receipt, set responses, and it’s up to us to keep a record of how many, when, accepted/declined, etc.
It’s not even that it is a betrayal of what Medium claims it wants to be…a better internet built on the quality of the writing…except it turns out they mean the quality of the pitches…rather than stories speaking for themselves. Pitching elevates the book cover and the blurb rather than the substance of the writing.
