I confess I haven't ever followed Medium. I don't use it, and I don't understand what's supposed to make it different from other publishing options like Twitter and Blogger. I did see 2 headlines just now at the top of my favorite link-gathering site Memeorandum.
The first is "Medium Editorial Team Update" at Medium itself, written by Ev Williams. This piece is incredibly dense and wordy, a style that makes me suspicious. What are you trying to hide/finesse?
I retreated to Wikipedia to read about Medium. There was no update showing the latest news, but I did learn that Evan Williams is the person who developed Twitter and also that he was the co-founder of Blogger. Clicking through on his name, I see that he is credited with coining the term "blogger," which you might think is something that I would know. Some additional clicking got me to the information that someone else coined the term "blog," but Williams goes down in the history of social media language for being the person who added the suffix that referred to the type of person.
The other headline at Memeorandum is "Medium Tells Journalists to Feel Free to Quit After Busting Union Drive/After what workers describe as a successful union-busting campaign, Ev Williams has announced to journalists who work for him that they should feel free to go" (Vice). Now, that's clear. Clear and clearly opinionated.
But I searched for Williams's name in the news and have turned up a NYT article, "Medium Offers Buyouts to Editorial Employees/A top executive is leaving the company, which announced plans to shift its focus from its own publications to writers who use its platform." So that's where I will start (and if you wonder why I read the NYT, this is a good example of why).
The "top executive" who is leaving is not Williams, but Siobhan O’Connor.
Evan Williams, a Twitter co-founder who started Medium in 2012, explained in a long email to the staff after the meeting that Medium was “making some changes” to its publishing strategy. He said Medium would reduce the budgets of the publications run by the company and redirect resources to supporting independent writers on the platform....
Some staff members wept on the video call, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting, who were not authorized to speak publicly. Employees were told that they did not have to take the buyouts but that their jobs would most likely change if they stayed, the people said....
Less than a month ago, a union drive at Medium failed. The Medium Workers Union fell one vote short of a simple majority of workers needed for union recognition....
Where's the "union busting"? I take it the unionization effort failed. I'm guessing the story at Vice is that these new changes are designed to fend off future unionizing success. The NYT eschews any talk of that.
I go back to Vice to explore my suspicion:
Employees at the company say that journalists who work at Medium’s nine publications were not the initial driving force behind the union, but were some of the most vocal supporters of it....
Medium hired the unionbusting firm Kauff McGuire & Margolis in the leadup to the February union vote. Williams also held “coffee chats” with small groups of workers, where four current employees told Motherboard that Williams said that it would be difficult to raise money from venture capitalists if the union won the vote.
“He mentioned in the all hands and the coffee chat that the VCs he talked to would not fund us if we unionized,” one current employee said. “This is awfully close to a ‘threat,’ which you can’t do, but just toes the line because he’s not saying ‘we’ll lose funding,’ he’s saying ‘I talked to someone who said we’ll lose funding.’”...
In his [March 23] email, Williams announced that the company's editorial strategy would be shifting away from a focus on publications.... Over the last several years, Medium, formerly a blogging platform, has invested heavily in hiring career journalists—writers, editors, and audience development experts—to create professional publications with specific editorial missions....
The move feels in some ways to emulate parts of the individual-based strategy that Substack has championed in the past few months, offering to showcase individual writers and provide them with deals and some support....
A current Medium employee said they believe that the move was retaliation for unionizing: “Editorial was the department that supported the union most vocally and visibly ... this is coming basically a month after a failed union drive preceded by pretty blatant union busting tactics by management.”
