Mr. Davis and Mr. Bearman were in Los Angeles last week talking about Epic with film executives and said they found that the appetite for great nonfiction in the wake of “Argo” — and several big sci-fi flops this summer — seems to be growing.

The story got more interesting when Mr. Bearman and Mr. Davis told me that the partner and backer in the effort will be Medium, a content platform that is just getting started as well.

You may not have heard of Medium, but it was co-founded by Evan Williams and Biz Stone, two of the creators of Twitter, and Jason Goldman, formerly of Twitter, so it may not be off your radar for long. And at a time when charging for content is all the rage, the stories on Medium will be there for the scrolling, gratis, on whatever device a reader happens to be using.

Mr. Williams isn’t talking about his involvement with Epic for the time being. But sitting in Bryant Park on a July afternoon, Mr. Bearman suggested that Medium was underwriting magazinelike projects because for a relatively small investment, the site can bring attention to a Web-based platform for content.

“My sense is that what they are looking for is high-quality content from us that will show what the platform can do,” he said, munching on lamb pita from a cart up the street.

“I think that in a lot of ways that the revolution that has taken place in film and Web production is just now coming to nonfiction,” he said. “Now writers have all these amazing digital options like Byliner, the Atavist and Kindle Singles. People are beginning to take production into their own hands.”

Epic is joining that fray. At the park, Mr. Bearman swiveled around a MacBook and showed off a working prototype of the kind of story that will wind up on Epic. It is Mr. Davis’s account of a troubled American mercenary who was hired to investigate a double homicide at a gold mine in the Peruvian Andes and falls in love with his translator along the way. The visual narrative is gorgeous, with big photos and artfully arranged text that would look good on almost any device.