A Fond and Grateful Farewell
Welcome to the finale of Peter Osnos’ Platform on Medium. Starting on January 10, this will become a newsletter appearing regularly on Substack. Here’s the reasoning:
Social media and digital delivery are a 21st century phenomenon. It is hard to fully fathom that this now omnipresent means of communication barely existed at the turn of the century, or at least, was not yet recognized for what it would become.
Now these are as entrenched in our lives as the automobile, the airplane, the television and what used to be called a “telephone.”
In 2017, in an effort to understand how social media worked — not wanting to be a 21St Century illiterate — I began to post pieces on Medium that I called “Peter Osnos’ Platform” choosing not to add a second “S” after the apostrophe, a grammatical quirk. Now we are dropping even that apostrophe.
This was another version of the Platform pieces I had been writing since 2006, hosted by the Century Foundation where I was a media fellow and appearing first on The Daily Beast and later on The Atlantic.com. I chose Medium because of its reputation as a meaningful venue for writing and because it would allow me to post at will avoiding the shoals of established publications where busy editors would judge the value of my words before they ever reached readers.
To begin with, I worked with a young editor, Athena Bryan, who would review the pieces and along with me decide how to illustrate them with a graphic of some kind. At last look, here were over seventy of these pieces. In time, as Athena’s full-time workload increased, I recruited an estimable editor and long time colleague, Paul Golob, to edit the posts and managed to assemble the graphics and publish them myself.
Next, I would link to the pieces on Twitter and Facebook. The goal was to see how each piece landed with views and readers. My objective was not grandiose: to reach an audience larger than a dinner party table. Several of the pieces attracted more than 1500 views and hundreds of readers. One piece that I liked, got less than 50. Stickiness is variable.
The key to pick-up I concluded was to catch the attention of people with substantial followings –journalists, authors, activists — whose endorsement guaranteed readers. In other words, it was much more about the sharing of the pieces than about my initial publication of them on Medium.
Obvious? Of course. But one revelation to me (at least) was that with well over one thousand Facebook “friends,” nearly all of whom had reached out to me with an invitation, I never heard from more than one hundred — the mystery of an algorithm that chose who might be interested in what I have to say. What happened to them? Someone doubtless knows the answer. I do not.
So, this Platform on Medium is the final one. I am moving the effort to Substack. To enable this transition, I am being guided by a master of the genre, Meredith Stark, who is giving me a course that is still underway.
The “About” post on Substack for Peter Osnos’ Platform will explain my intentions for these newsletters. These will be free but there will be an option to subscribe with the revenue going to two non-profits that are especially important to my wife, Susan, and I. CIVIC (The Center for Civilians in Conflict) and the Barth Syndrome Foundation (BSF) which funds research into a rare disease afflicting boys.
We are starting the newsletter January 10 and will reach out to a contact list I am compiling, a tedious process, but yet another part of developing a social media profile. All friends and followers on Facebook are free (or paid) to subscribe. To subscribe go to PeterOsnos.substack.com.
For now, thanks to Medium for providing a venue for Peter Osnos’ Platform. And to my followers, do join me on Substack.
