One morning in February 2012, we clicked a button and launched a Kickstarter campaign. We wanted to build MATTER — a publication based around a new way to create really great long-form journalism about science, technology and the future.
What followed was an extraordinary vote of confidence in the idea: by the time the campaign closed a few weeks later, 2,500 people had helped us raise $140,000, almost three times the amount we’d targeted.
More recently, MATTER received another incredible vote of confidence. One of our earliest Kickstarter backers was Ev Williams, a co-founder of Twitter, Blogger and, of course, one of the creators of the website you’re reading right now. After we launched, Ev told us how his team wants Medium to be the best place on the internet to read and create high-quality content. And earlier this year, he suggested that MATTER become part of that project.
It didn’t take us long to realise how much sense that made for us, our readers and for the people we work with. We’re delighted to announce today that the move is complete: MATTER is now part of Medium.
If you already know what we do, don’t expect big changes yet. Our service is an ongoing experiment, but we have no immediate plans to alter the team, the places we publish (our website and the Kindle store), or how much we charge for each article. More importantly, we have no plans — at any time — to stop crafting hard-hitting narratives about big ideas. One of the things that made it easy to join Medium was the knowledge that the company believes in great storytelling as much as we do, and is prepared to support what we do.
But we will be rolling out some changes in the coming months. We’ve already started using Medium to expand on the ideas we cover — see, for example, Amputees & Wannabes, the recent series of commentaries around our launch story, Do No Harm. We’ll also be introducing some exciting changes at the MATTER website; changes that will make the site better for readers, and improve our mechanism for supporting long-form writing.
And we’ll be helping Medium become an even better place for smart, thoughtful writing, as we work alongside the great editorial team that’s being assembled there (Ev’s written about things from his perspective, too).
If you don’t know MATTER, then hello. To get to know us, you could start with Do No Harm, which is currently free to read here at Medium. And if you like that story, consider becoming a MATTER member. It costs just 99c per month and provides free access to everything we publish, as well as a range of exclusive benefits.
Thanks to everyone who has helped us get this far, not least our Kickstarter backers; our Members and our readers; every single one of our contributors; and the people who built something solid out of our idea: Paul Lloyd, Jeremy Keith and the design team at Clearleft, and our developer, Phil Gyford.
We’re excited. Let’s see what happens next.
Bobbie & Jim, MATTER founders
