Conversations, Not Competition

The Case For Syndication Across Publications and Shared Bylines on Medium Stories

Publishing has always been a zero sum game. Eyeballs on a competitor’s stories meant fewer on your own and smaller audience share meant lower revenue. This is the economic driver behind very specific ways of thinking about how to run a publication. Publications attempt to break stories first in order to capture the largest share of the audience (conversely, competing publications put out “hot takes” in an attempt to blunt that monopoly and steal audience share). Competition breeds the need for exclusivity — over authors and over stories.

Medium is succeeding not least because it brought the design aesthetics of glossy magazine publishing to the web in a dead-simple interface. But other norms from the traditional publishing industry — not necessarily beneficial — crept in along with the design aesthetic. Specifically, the norms of content exclusivity derived from the economic imperatives of traditional publishing. That might be a mistake.

Medium doesn’t face the same economic pressures as a Vogue or even a Vox. In fact, until they unveil a monetization strategy, I would say that Medium has completely different, non-economic imperatives that should dictate product decisions: quality of editorial experience, real world impact, and development of active communities being the most important.

One way to measure success across all three of these factors is through depth and breadth of conversation.

Instead of designing editorial practices around the economic imperatives of old-school publishing, Medium should design the editorial experience around a conversational imperative that asks “does an editorial or functional choice expand the breadth of conversation or arbitrarily limit conversation?”

With a conversational, rather than economic, imperative in mind, one product/functionality change immediately demands consideration:

Medium should allow writers and editors to cross-publish content into more than one publication.

When viewed through the lens of increasing/expanding conversation, the case for multi-publication syndication is strong.

• Syndication pops the filter bubble, causing unlike audiences to collide. For example, UNICEF manages a great publication about photography and social change. It makes sense that they aggregate their work in a brand-managed publication. Syndication would enable UNICEF to submit those posts to a publication like Vantage, whose 33k followers might be interested in UNICEF’s photography and the stories they tell, but who do not traditionally follow global development issues. In the recent criminal justice reform debate hosted by Medium, researchers, advocates and others could have posted both within their own publications, and the Medium-sponsored Town Hall publication. Those who are on opposite sides of the issue could have hosted their own mini-debates by cross posting to each other’s publications, exposing vastly different audiences to new ideas and aggregating responses from both sides into a single conversational space. That could go a long way towards achieving some of the measurable goals I laid out for the project.
• Syndication expands access among like-minded audiences. Publishing to an organization that is on a different side of an issue is not always a viable option (and certainly something that might be more of an impactful exception rather than a best-practice/rule). But cross-posting among partners might have great value on an ongoing basis. You could easily see how a smaller advocacy organization working on a single issue (for example, gun control) might want to publish to their own publication, but still retain the ability to have their content aggregated up into the publication of a larger partner (say American Progress (CAP) or New America) that has a wider issue focus and broader audience. You could also see how Medium, in the interest of promoting high-quality content on its platform, might want to pull a particularly compelling/successful story into a third publication that it owns.
• Syndication supports writers, and encourages more writing. This is a dilemma I face constantly. My employer runs a publication on Medium, but I enjoy building up my own properties. I also see value in publishing my work to other publications where I’m a writer. When I write a piece I’m particularly proud of, I have to choose which of those properties gets to “own” my content even though those three publications aren’t directly competing for audience share (in fact, cross publication would probably expose them all to larger audiences). The ability to syndicate in this fashion would help me as a writer build my audience, and deepen my affinity for Medium as my platform of choice. That in turn creates an incentive for me to write more on the platform, which leads to more conversation and more value for everyone involved.

This is not to say that multi-publication syndication doesn’t also raise a host of thorny UX and editorial management questions. Even as this opens the door for more conversations, deeper conversations and conversations across communities, it also opens the door to a massive amount of spam for the editors who run publications.

Picture it — life hackers and click-bait writers (or just well-intentioned, semi-desperate folks) submitting their content to every publication on Medium. Bots doing nothing but submitting content in an effort to drive traffic. Total nightmare.

Medium’s product team will need to test and experiment (or poll existing editors) to determine the best way to minimize spammy requests and maximize value. One potential solution could limit user submissions to just two or three concurrent requests. Another could provide Editors a view into the number of active requests and a count of how many (and which) publications accepted. Or Medium could put the editors fully in control and allow for syndication beyond one publication by invitation only. There are any number of potential solutions waiting to be explored.

Co-Authorship and Bylines

I’ve focused on a way in which Medium is limiting itself by adopting an exclusionary/competitive model that is a legacy of traditional publishing. But there is also one convention that failed to travel to Medium: co-authorship and shared bylines.

Right now, it’s impossible to co-edit a piece with another Medium user and have the piece appear co-bylined and attributed equally to each user’s profile. That’s a huge omission in functionality and one that actively disincentivizes collaboration. It’s also a wasted opportunity to increase Medium’s impact in the public policy space.

Here are just a few situations where shared bylines could encourage more stories that are high quality and hugely impactful:

• Team investigations (multiple reporters/writers/researchers contributing to a project that is larger than what they could produce on their own, but smaller than a project meriting a group publication)
• Mixed media partnerships that access different networks (e.g. photographer/videographer + writer/reporter)
• Bipartisan/cross ideological partnerships

This last situation is one that I think could be hugely impactful — for Medium’s visibility as a platform and for developing Medium as a space for substantive public debate.

Thinking back to the last 10–15 years in politics, some of the most impactful moments are those where “strange bedfellows” came together: the Bush and Clinton families partnering on global development issues; Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich coming together over climate change; or even the Koch Brother’s recent support for criminal justice reform (…maybe…).

There are so few opportunities for those on opposite sides of the aisle to come together in a productive fashion. Shared bylines on Medium could offer a small-lift, but potentially high-impact, way to bridge some of those divides in the name of pushing forward important conversations.