A Post for and about Medium Members

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we pay for news. Who pays? Who should pay? Who is the ideal beneficiary of journalism?

First of all, who should own your news?

Should your news outlet of favor be bankrolled by billionaire West-coast tech moguls? The Washington Post is certainly sustainable, but its confidence to puff out its chest comes from Jeff Bezos’ deep Amazon-funded pockets. The New Republic was unsuccessfully owned by Facebook’s Chris Hughes for a time before he threw in the towel. The Atlantic, where I work, was just bought by Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple visionary Steve Jobs. Will her experiment help sustain a 160-year-old magazine?

How about Rupert Murdoch? His heavy hand has guided the Wall Street Journal and Fox News Channel for decades. Or how about another billionaire like Sheldon Adelson who owns the Las Vegas Review-Journal with unabashed conservative overreach that extends into the newsroom? Or, the relatively liberal oft-richest man in the world Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway owns the Buffalo News and his hometown Omaha World-Herald?

Should your news be owned by the rich and powerful? What if the owners are an idyllic family with a dynastic stake in the great news of the day: the Sulzbergers at the Times or how the Grahams were at the Post?

Or a Gannett or a Tribune or a Sinclair or a Time or a Meredith? Do you feel more comfortable with public companies with distributed networks and interests across states and genres?

Or how something like the Newhouse family’s Advance Publications which owns everything from local news like the Staten Island Advance and NJ Advance Media to the Condé Nast brands like the New Yorker and Vanity Fair and Wired?

What sounds ideal?

And who should pay for news? Should it be advertisers mostly? What kinds of advertisers are you comfortable with? Are you as comfortable with Exxon Mobil as you are with Coca-Cola? How about Smith & Wesson? What if the ads are native, beautifully designed and written and blended into the style and format of a news site? Are you comfortable with that?

Or would you prefer a strictly subscriber-based model? No ads, if you pay up. Do paywalls make you crazy? Did you try to read three articles on Foreign Affairs this month and were stopped after the first one? I did.

Most news organizations employ a number of these techniques. Paywalls, subscriptions—print and digital and mobile and maybe crossword too, like the Times—banner ads, native ads, display ads, programmatic ads, underwritten content, sponsored series that are actually editorially sound.

Rarely, does one outlet employ one revenue model. And rightfully so. There’s issues with each.

Display ads are ineffective, native ads are ethically murky, readers don’t usually want to pay for news, and Google and Facebook have eaten the vast majority of all digital ad revenue with their insurmountable duopoly. Meanwhile, rich patrons don’t want to lose money—or too much money—on even a vanity media ownership.

Which brings me to Medium.

I was as confused as you were when I saw Ev’s post about the future of Medium. Truth be told, I am still not entirely clear about what it is and what it means. I’m writing this post, in part, to see and experience the benefits and shortcomings for myself.

Anyone can paywall anything… and make money off of it? Sounds good to me. “Hit that **CLAP** and send that good Medium cash my way!” I thought.

But, it’s more complicated than that. Medium, by its own design, has split personality disorder. It is at once a social network, a news curator, and a content-management system (CMS) for publishers. Realistically, it’s a much better CMS than it is a social network. Its design is pretty, typing is natural, formatting is simple, and it’s all-in-one. Who could want more?

Medium, by its own design, has split personality disorder.

As a social network, it’s limited. I don’t hyperlink through from story to story… I don’t see my friends posts all the time. I see frequent Medium writers pushed to the homepage on topics in which I may or may not be interested. Perhaps rightfully, Medium’s homepage feels more like a scattered blog, a piecemeal amalgam of ~content~ rather than anything logical, organized, or laid out. There’s no editorial discretion, no prime placement, but no logical social network flow or interactivity either.

Medium’s problem has always been that is neither a great news curator nor a great social network. It is a great CMS and that’s why it has potential. And, this week’s move to an “open paywall,” along with moves for extended or exclusive high-quality content in recent months, has upped Medium’s game as the web’s foremost journalism aggregator not named Facebook, Google, Reddit, or Twitter.

The problem therein is that plenty of websites have migrated their entire existence to Medium… and because of mercurial shifts from Medium’s top brass, so many have left in such a short time: The Awl, Pacific Standard, ThinkProgress, The Ringer. The problem therein is that publishers cannot entrust their financial existence on a CMS that looks like a news site but changes its mind like a social network. There’s too much at stake.

That’s a distribution problem. Medium has lost trust with publishers because it’s erratic, not static.

We’ve entered a new era of Medium where padlocks grace posts, including this one. For five bucks a month, you can get top-quality journalism, commentary, creative nonfiction, poetry, storytelling, mystery, investigation, memoir. Whether sixty a year, far cheaper than most news subscriptions, is worth the cost for consumers, is still to be proven. But, as Medium inches closer to a publisher’s haven it needs to act in a way that is more respectful of those creating content for them. Not just shlubs like me, but major news outlets, Medium-hosted outlets, frequent bloggers, and the creative forces that will break out of the mold and take Medium to the next level. Think about the early YouTubers, how stars were created and funded and how each monetization adjustment rocked worlds for better or, typically, worse.

I began this post with a discussion of news ownership because consumers should consider who owns, and therefore, who pays for their news. Is it a mogul, a financier, a patron, an advertiser, or a consumer? Are you paying for news or are you reading it as the news finds you?

If you signed up to pay for Medium, good on you. You’re paying for others to have a few free members-only articles a month and you’re paying for everyone to have free access to all free articles all the time. It’s a subsidy, in a way, and you are subsidizing the reading of others.

That’s how it’s always worked, in a way. Maybe you are the ideal beneficiary of journalism. Or maybe journalism is broken beyond repair.

What questions do you have for me? Was this post too scattered? We touched on a lot, so what should we expand on? What’s off-topic? What’s on-point? Do you think Medium is a great social network? A great news source? A great CMS? Or do you hate Medium’s guts? Let me know here or lets start a conversation on Twitter @ScottNover or via email at sgnover at gmail.