Medium, the three-year-old online publishing platform run by one of the founders of Twitter, has spent much of its infancy assiduously courting members of the political class.

The pitch is clear: Get your message out with none of the editorial interference that comes with old-school media.


The effort has paid off. Hillary Clinton, under fire for not taking a stand on the Keystone XL pipeline, turned to Medium in September when she decided to come out against the project. John Boehner, on the verge of fulfilling a lifelong dream of meeting the pope, posted a chatty preview of the visit on Medium. And Mitt Romney, with the GOP field on tenterhooks, announced on Medium that he would be sitting out the 2016 presidential race.

But while a growing legion of Washington power brokers is sold, there’s an uneasiness taking shape among some in the press.

The Knight Foundation earlier this month awarded a $140,000 grant to PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning website run by the Tampa Bay Times, to fact check the growing number of claims politicians are making on Medium.

But the pushback only captures some of what makes Medium so appealing in the first-place – it’s an end-run around the media.

In a sign of how much Medium is banking on Washington’s frustration with traditional news outlets, the San Francisco-based company established a D.C. office last spring and has spent months recruiting new voices in Washington.

Working mostly out of a shared work space on Pennsylvania Avenue, just blocks from the Capitol, Medium's small team has worked the phones and done face-to-face meetings in coffee shops and congressional offices, making the case for its service and training prospective users on the most effective ways to use it.

The effort has taken place on both sides of the aisle. This summer, for example, Matt Higginson, the company's first employee in Washington, made a presentation to Democratic digital staffers in the Senate, but he was also in Colonial Williamsburg to pitch Republican press secretaries on Medium's merits.

The message from Higginson, who was previously with the anti-poverty group ONE, is one that is at least partially based on flattery. "Medium wants to be the default place for people to go when they have ideas of consequence, for storytelling, for conversations that matter," he said. "Breaking paradigms isn't going to happen entirely organically."

Medium has a lot to gain in Washington. Establishing itself as the place where national leaders go to talk to one another helps the company, which has struggled a bit to decide what it wants to be, carve out a place in the online ecosystem. And it can piggyback off a broader shift in the relationship between Washington and journalism, with the political world no longer quite so dependent on the press in the age of social media.

The White House's decision last January to post the State of the Union speech on Medium just before Obama delivered it represented a real coup for the company, launched in 2012 by Twitter co-founder Ev Williams.

Washington players say they're drawn to Medium's simplicity. The site, described by Williams as a "beautiful canvas," has no real advertising to distract from a politician's message. Also appealing, they say, are social-media features designed to get posts noticed, including a Facebook-like ability to tag other users, and statistics that shed light on who is reading. But Medium has also made a sustained effort around what it calls "influencer outreach," identifying and training users from the presidential campaigns, Congress, federal agencies and political strategy firms.

"Done right, you get many of the benefits of placing an op-ed without any of the hassles," says Matt Lira, a digital strategist with House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who published an Oct. 22 piece on Medium about El Niño and the California drought. "Medium has done a great job making the platform look incredibly professional for people with zero technical ability."

Medium today hosts a variety of politically themed content — from the White House posting the text of the Iran deal or GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina posting campaign updates — alongside sports and consumer fare such as Hope Solo's goodbye to the retiring Abby Wambach and “Become A Morning Person in 7 Easy Steps.”

Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), White House photographer Pete Souza, and the U.S. trade representative are also among Medium's high-profile users.

Caitlin Hayden, a former National Security Council spokeswoman now with the public relations firm Edelman, calls it a neutral space that encourages more media coverage, because it sidesteps reporters' distaste for covering an op-ed in a competing publication. "It's just a Medium post," says Hayden.

Still, that cycle is starting to raise concerns among some journalists, who bristled at the White House's use of Medium during the State of the Union, saying it amounted to a bypass around the media. Reporters are used to receiving the speech ahead of time under embargo, in order to get responses from Capitol Hill and prep stories ahead of time.

The White House anticipated some grumbling about its use of Medium with the State of the Union, but it was part of a deliberate rethinking of how the president can make better use of the changing digital landscape, says former White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer, who for a time served as an adviser to Medium.

"While everyone in Washington had a copy of the speech, no one in the public did, and that's kind of a dumb thing," says Pfeiffer, who recently joined the crowdfunding site GoFundMe. "So, we thought let's put it out fully on Medium, and give people a chance to read the speech in their own time and their own way.'"

Before leaving the White House, Pfeiffer brought on Jason Goldman, a co-founder of Medium's parent company Obvious, as the first-ever White House chief digital officer.

A media-world dispute this fall served to further raise Medium's profile in D.C. Former White House press secretary Jay Carney, now an Amazon executive, used Medium to take The New York Times to task for a story harshly critical of the company's workplace culture; Carney even posted a copy of a Times reporter's email to buttress his claim that the newspaper had promised a more nuanced story.

Despite running one of the world's best-known publications, Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet responded to Carney on Medium. A few hours later, Carney used his Medium account to post a follow-up to Baquet.

"The people who used to be sources for news stories can go direct," said New York University media critic Jay Rosen. And if enough well-known people do it on Medium, at a certain point, "imitation takes over," he said.

"It's becoming this marketplace for candidates to post, to go around the filter of the traditional media," said PolitiFact's executive director, Aaron Sharockman. Medium lets readers annotate specific passages, and Sharockman said his writers would use this feature to fact check right in the margins of politicians' posts.

The company — which raised $57 million in new funding last fall from venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Google's venture arm — is aiming to make money off sponsored content, which looks nearly identical to unpaid stories. It's already partnered with BMW on a collection of posts called "Re:form," aimed at amplifying the car brand through stories.

As for Washington, Medium is eager to build upon the energy of the 2016 election.

In July, the company brought on Mitt Romney campaign alumnus Jack Gerard Jr. to lead its outreach to conservatives. (His is a familiar name in Washington: He's the son and namesake of the CEO of American Petroleum Institute.) The company is now looking for his counterpart on the left. Both will look for ways they can tweak the platform to better serve the Washington audience, like dicing up reader stats by geography so that lawmakers can see how many of the people reading their posts are constituents.

But where once Medium was eager to take every possible meeting around town, says Higginson, the company is beginning to put more of its energy into brainstorming high-profile projects. In November, the company, riffing off National Adoption Month, helped House Republicans create a series of first-person stories about foster care and adoption.

"People that thrive on bombast and vitriol, well, Medium might not be for them," says Higginson. "But for members of Congress who bemoan that their position has to be boiled down to 15-second soundbites — those are the people we're trying to cultivate."