The Tale Of The Establishment’s Migration To Medium—And What It Means For You
Once upon a time (read: July 2016), Silicon Valley’s preeminent social publishing platform (read: Medium — launched in 2012 by Twitter cofounder Ev Williams) approached The Establishment (read: the very website you’re perusing right now) about migrating from our home on WordPress to join the ranks of digital publishers like ThinkProgress, The Awl, Pacific Standard, and Femsplain in the broader Medium ecosystem of talented writers and engaged readers.
Your protagonist (again, that would be The Establishment), had a number of concerns: What of all the painstaking design work that had gone into our WordPress site? What of our readers — the very best in the cosmos — who’d come to expect a certain, dare-we-say, unique and beautiful brand look?
And looming largest of all in our minds, what of our almost unheard of autonomy? Would we have to sacrifice our intersectionality and integrity; our anger or delight in expletives and sex; our commitment to publishing those unheard voices central to our societal salvation, on the altar of the internet gods?
