Our first year was busy. Here’s what happens next.
MATTER celebrated its first birthday last week. It’s been a straight-out crazy first year: We’ve run 12 stories, won three major awards, recruited two superb new editors and now we’ve moved the publication to a new home — the website that you’re reading right now. And the coming twelve months look even more exciting.
For starters, we’re going to complete our integration with Medium by moving all our content over and closing down the old readmatter.com. Our first story here—The Dream Catcher, about the strange life of an exiled sleep scientist—is live now, and the rest will follow.
We’re also making a big change to the way we get our journalism out there. Everything we publish will now be free to read, and we’ll be rolling out a new membership scheme so that we can find ways to reward the brilliant writers and editors we work with. We’ll have much more to say on that, and why we think it’s the best way forward for us, in the new year.
(If you’re already a MATTER Member and wonder what will happen to the audio or ebook versions of our stories, fear not: We’ll continue sending both to you, free of charge, while we make the transition.)
The third big change is another big one: We’ll be producing more long-form. We’re stepping up from our previous story-a-month approach, and moving to more regular, hard-hitting long-form features. Will more output mean lower quality? We promise you that it absolutely will not. One of our core goals for the next year is to make MATTER’s pieces—which are already competing with some of the best out there—better and better.
And that’s not all. We’ve got more plans that we’ll be sharing over the next few months. The best way to get a heads-up on all these is to sign up for OVERMATTER, our weekly newsletter.
What else? You tell us. We’re still fine-tuning our plans and appreciate all suggestions. Reach us at matter@medium.com.
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