Welcome to Serious Eats @ Medium

Serious Eats is joining Medium’s membership publication program by launching a whole new version of itself. You can find SE@M here, if you’re not already there. To sign up for membership, just click on any members-only story with the little lock symbol, such as this one. You can read a little more about Medium’s membership and publisher tools here.

Like most publishers, we’re eager to experiment when it comes to new audience, new platforms and communities, and new sources of revenue. We recently ran an informal Twitter poll asking if readers would be willing to pay for an ad-free Serious Eats, and the results were typical — usually only about 10% of any given audience express such an inclination. And even fewer will typically pony up when the opportunity presents itself. We have no plans to abandon advertising as a business model, but we’re sensitive to how readers feel about intrusive or distracting advertising. And we’re curious to see if our content appeals to those who prefer to read ad-free.

But an ad-free version of Serious Eats isn’t compelling enough by itself. It makes sense to provide that experience on Medium, because it can be done relatively easily here. But why not take this opportunity to try new and different approaches to what we already love doing? Why not make new stuff for new readers too?

What’s different about SE@M?

Exclusive stuff. Once per week, SE@M will host new, original work in line with the main Serious Eats editorial cosmos but specifically crafted for the Medium audience. Serious Eats’ managing culinary director Kenji López-Alt contributed the first of these exclusives. Others will come from both Serious Eats staff and contributors as well as new friends we’ve found on Medium and elsewhere. If you’re interested in pitching an idea, check out our guidelines. We are paying contributors, though very modestly at first. Given SE@M’s experimental nature, we’re starting small. If it takes off, and in particular if the exclusives are well received, we’ll publish more of them and pay more.

The story and recipe feed from Serious Eats’ main site will also publish on SE@M, including photos, but without advertising. SE@M versions of main Serious Eats content are necessarily more elemental. Since this is a semi-automated external feed, it will not be 100% Medium-native. Contextual story hyperlinks to pre-existing Serious Eats content will still link to destination pages on the main site, rather than their Medium equivalents. SE@M only began feeding stories to Medium in late March, so the vast majority of the Serious Eats archive remains on the main site. Some special story formats on the main site don’t translate easily into the Medium-friendly feed, so those will be absent until we can come up with a customized import. The dates and times of the Medium stories will be different than their main-site equivalents (especially for older posts) until we can fully automate the feed-post process. Many other niceties of custom website publishing will be absent too. Given that Medium’s formatting is simpler than what’s available to the wider web, our feed might cause occasional hiccups as it translates to Medium. Please do let us know if you see anything odd, malformed, or broken.

As we observe audience preferences and Medium continues to evolve their technology, we hope to smooth out these inconsistencies and make it easier for readers who prefer SE@M to enjoy it seamlessly. The goal here is not to blindly drive traffic back to the main Serious Eats site, but to create an entirely new experience suited to Medium.

And then … ??? There are a number of Medium-specific features that might be fun to explore for SE@M, such as responses, letters, and so on. Some may not make sense for the membership area, but others (and other new functionality) might be cool. We’re open to playing with all toys available to us, and we’re open to suggestions.

Why charge five dollars? That’s too much!

It’s arbitrary, we admit. The gulf between zero and anything is infinite, but if you’re going to charge anything, $5 seems like not too much to ask. It’s a significant loss leader for 4–5 exclusives per month and a whole ad-free feed, that’s for sure. If you think it’s excessive and don’t want to pay, it won’t hurt our feelings.

“We Want to Hear from You”

Such a cliche, but true in this case. Feel free to respond to this post on Medium or through our other social channels on Twitter or Facebook with your thoughts, ideas, critiques, complaints, riffs, praise, takes, or tirades. Or email us at medium@seriouseats.com. We’ll grow SE@M along with other Medium membership publications, observing their trials and errors as well as our own. But we want feedback from inside and outside the paywall. So get in touch. And let’s have a good time.