The Savage and the Sieve

Why publishing platforms are not news outlets

This is a post for Medium, about Medium, published on Medium. Depending on your definition of “journalism,” you could call it journalism, though I would call it an essay, or, in newsroom parlance, an “op-ed.”

Yesterday, in response to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ acquisition of The Washington Post, Anil Dash tweeted:

“In terms of tech billionaire media platforms, @ev’s Medium still seems more likely to thrive long-term than Hughes/TNR or Bezos/WaPo.”

I kind of hate the “I have a lot of respect for” disclaimer; it implies that the respected cares about my opinion, and why would he? But, definitely, I have a lot of respect for Mr. Dash. He has written many wise observations about the states of the internet. And his speculation makes sense; his writing is very Medium-y, (close cultural essays, written in the first person, about subjects greater than ourselves) and in terms of critical reception and growth, Medium has had a spectacular first year. If something meshes with your ethos and experiences rapid success, it is natural for you to want to heap roses on its cradle.

As a publishing platform, I think Medium is pretty great. The design (the building of which you can read, in beautiful detail, here) is conducive to thoughtful writing: no whistles and just enough bells to make your words shine. The recommend and tweet buttons are pleasing to click, and the analytics and activity summary are easy to digest.

As a media platform, however… Well, first of all: what is a media platform? Dash’s tweet seems to suggest that The New Republic and the Washington Post are media platforms, and that Medium is one as well, so what do these three entities have in common?

Not much, I think.

The New Republic is a weekly magazine that publishes political and cultural commentary. The Washington Post is a daily newspaper with a large focus on national politics. Medium is, mostly, a place where individuals with Twitter accounts can post their thoughts in a longer format than Twitter allows.

There are two characteristics Medium shares with TNR and WaPo:

1) Publishing stories

2) An owner who is also a founder of an incredibly successful technology company.

Currently, number 1 applies to a very small number of the stories that appear on Medium: most of the stuff you read on Medium is not published by Medium, but by its users (though it may be elevated to the homepage by Medium’s editorial staff). This may change, of course. In April, Medium bought the lovely Kickstarter-funded science magazine Matter; and they’ve published researched pieces by reporters like Felix Salmon and Sloan Crosley. But right now, I would say Medium is much more like Tumblr (which had its own, now shuttered editorial experiment) than it is like the Washington Post.

To answer my own question about what a media platform is: I guess it’s a place that, at least in part, takes ownership and responsibility of publishing media. That is not to say, however, that it publishes news. It may publish news, or it may publish stories, or it may, like Medium, publish a bit of both.

Admission: I don’t really like the term “platform,” because it implies horizontal publishing access, and the quality of the information put forth by The New Republic and the Washington Post depends on vertical publishing access.

In startuplandia, there is great belief in citizen horizontalism. We should all be able to be whatever we want to be with a minimum of checkpoints. You want to be a reporter? Here’s a keyboard; inform us!

A cheery belief, and one that, in practice, would be disastrous. Checks, in news publishing as in government, are critical. In government, they prevent the people who make the laws from being the same people who enforce them. In news publishing, they stanch the spread of unsubstantiated and/or libelous information.

Medium, as we saw with last week’s Pressure Cooker story, doesn’t have these checkpoints. And that’s ok, really. As a publishing platform, it doesn’t need them; it makes no claims about the veracity of information put forth by its users.

Where it is also a media platform, it ought to have them. Likely it does.

As a news platform, it would have to have them.

And that’s why Mr. Dash’s tweet rubbed me the wrong way: it lumped Medium with a news outlet when in reality the two are much more different than they are alike.

One last thing: were Medium to get into the news business but remain a platform, it might be able to perform verification algorithmically. Until the day comes where it presents itself as a news publishing platform, though, I’m inclined to think of it as a place to read thoughts, and not to read truths.