Medium Wishlist

@Medium. Guys and gals, you are doing a wonderful job.

I am Srinath, an editor of “The Coffeelicious”. I have been with the publication for almost two years now(since Oct 13, 2013). There were some hiccups along the way, but I have thoroughly enjoyed working on Medium.

As an editor, the best part of my day is when a story in a publication gets 10s and 100s of recommends. My heart skips a beat when a noted author submits a story or when medium staff recommends one in the publication. It would not be an overstatement when I say that I have spent the better part of the last two years going over countless author’s profiles and requesting any story that was beautifully written but did not garner enough appreciation.

A good article should get appreciation.

Medium has given me a chance to work with some of the best writers around the world. As with any beautiful art, Medium too has some blemishes. Here is my wishlist for Medium. Feel free to add one in the response.

1. Schedule publishing stories. As much as I would like to believe that the time of publishing a story has nothing to do with the number of impressions (yes, I meant impressions not views) it gets, that is not exactly what’s happening. Since, Medium has mostly users from the western world right now, publishing stories according to those timings yields better results. And, as editing stories takes some time, it would be better if publications are able to publish stories even if the editor is sleeping.
2. Notify writers when edited. O’Neill has written a post regarding this. I think Medium should notify authors whenever their post is changed by the editor. Medium is already providing a revision history which is very helpful to retrieve old versions, but adding this feature will make it even much better.
3. Publication statistics — Total number of reads and views on a day of all the stories. Total number of home page visits. This helps in monetizing the publication by using stats to attract sponsors for the title. Also, it is becoming difficult to search for a story in a huge list of stories in the stats page. Can you provide a search option here? Also, Personally I prefer line graph than a bar graph. That shows the slope (growth) better than a bar graph. Who is with me on this?
4. Send email to all the writers. For publications with a good number of writers, it gets difficult to track all the email ids. You have already provided an option to send a letter to all the readers. Would it be difficult to do the same with all the writers?
5. Provision to select stories in tagged sections or at least show the latest stories in tagged section, which makes a lot of sense. Also, stories tagged in the section should not come up under “Latest”. They should come under tagged section only.
6. Number of times a story was seen by a reader in his feed (like impressions on twitter). So that we can understand how to write better titles/subtitles and add better cover pics.
7. Option to select any story the editor wants to be featured. Right now it is limited to around latest 30 stories. So, what if the editor wants to feature some old but awesome stories? He/she cannot do it.
8. In app/website communication between Editors — writers/to be writers. Tom Farr in his post here explains perfectly the exact need for this. Communication between writers/editors on Medium is difficult. Even if we want to communicate outside Medium it is very difficult to get the email id of the writer. I hope Medium releases a tool for this. This is an urgent need.
9. Monetization tool. Are you guys working on this? Or, should we work on it ourselves? Edit — Shane Snow of Contently explains here exactly what is needed now to monetize Journalism without advertising. I especially like the first point where he mentions “Direct Pay” as one of the ways to overcome sponsored content and save Journalism. Will Medium be able to do this? Latterly Magazine already does this. It would be awesome if Medium allowed this method.
10. In built grammar checker for editors — at least.
11. Live updates, like twitter.
12. Twitter/facebook icons at the top of the home page of the publication. You guys provided an option for this earlier. What happened? That way publications need not ask readers to follow them in every story they publish. I know that the target is to make Medium an independent social network. But Medium needs to attract readers from other social networks. It needs a better presence in other social networks. One way is for the publications to attain a larger following in these social networks.
13. Show number of recommends after the story is recommended. That way readers won’t recommend just because there are a lot of recommends already in the story. No peer pressure.
14. Hover over the publication or writer icon in the feed to get small user profile like twitter.
15. Stories once published in a publication should not be moved to another publication. Sorry writers. This is something very core to a publication. In the race to get more recommends you move your stories from one publication to another. What about the work the editor does on your story? He/she is not just an editor. He/she is also a curator. Are you betraying the publication and the editor by removing it and adding it to another publication?
16. Also, regarding the above point, starting today if any writer removes a story from Coffeelicious and publishes it into another, we are not going to publish more of that writer’s work, how much ever brilliant that article might be. Neither, will we publish stories which have been published in other publications.

Wishes from other publications and authors.

1. The Week — “Custom domains is something we really are looking forward to. We need one for branding and selling our website to potential clients/advertisers, especially in our market here in Malaysia where most people know what Blogger is, but have never heard of Medium. I’ve emailed Medium about it but have yet to hear from them. With the hundreds of thousands of Medium users — perhaps Medium could allow us to use our own custom domains for a small fee?”
2. Justin Cox — “Medium should give user profile pages the same layout options and features that publications have.”

There are few people I would like to thank for this amazing journey. One @vyonup. And another @JSCarroll. Both have been with the publication since it was an infant. Although a noted author, Jonathan did not hesitate to publish his stories with us, especially when we had fewer followers than he did.

Stephen C Rose. He was the first person to introduce serial fiction in the publication. Thanks to him, we are able to sport six fiction series on our home page. Take a look.