How we’re tailor-making Medium content

Medium is a key plank in our social media strategy

James Waddell
The Economist Digital
3 min readDec 8, 2016

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Photo credit: Chris Luczkow

The Economist’s end-of-year double-issue has always been a little different to our typical weekly offering of news and analysis. For one edition a year, our writers are let loose to cover curious subjects that would normally be jostled out of the paper by news. Past stories have ranged from how family values shape China’s market for sex toys, to bow-and-arrow hunting in America, to catching frogs in the Western Ghats. These stories allow for a little more stylistic latitude than the weekly newspaper, with more personal anecdotes, lengthier reflection, and quirkier expression.

We knew this writerly focus was a perfect match for our readers on Medium, and that there was gold in our Christmas issue archive. So we decided to follow our Medium publication’s focus on America’s election with the longform essays from our Christmas issues. As our About page explains, the page will showcase the best of Christmas issues past and present. This means publishing some of the most memorable essays from the archive, alongside new pieces from the 2016 edition.

As well as publishing the articles themselves, we’re going to be crafting tailor-made bonus content, exclusively for our Medium readers. Correspondents’ Notebooks will give personal insights from our writers on the stories behind their stories — where they came from, what they did, and who they met along the way: a masterclass in reporting from the very best in the profession. One of our central aims on social platforms is to highlight the old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting that our journalists do, in locations all over the world, and we hope that Notebooks will enable that. Photo Essays will feature pictures taken by writers in the field, woven into stunning multimedia pieces, putting our multimedia editorial credentials on display.

We started on December 1st with a story from 2009, an analysis of the world’s hardest languages. The piece notched up about 20 times as many views as our average post on Medium. Both that story and our letter announcing our new approach shot into Medium’s Top 20 most recommended stories over the weekend. Prior to the relaunch, we had suspected that we’d be able to use Medium to find more readers seeking high-quality content carefully curated and created with them in mind. Still, we were pleasantly surprised by the magnitude of the response to our opening offering.

The next step for our Medium publication is to introduce the content we’re making exclusively for Medium. If it’s a success, we’d like to continue making it after we’ve finished with the Christmas issue, making it a permanent feature of our Medium presence. Medium offers a fantastic platform for us to create original content and present it to a receptive and enthusiastic audience. More than that, it is a plank in our overall strategy — another venue to showcase the breadth of what The Economist has to offer.

James Waddell is a social media writer at The Economist.

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