On Medium
Last week I wrote Texas Politics about the legislative-gamesmanship theatrics around Wendy Davis’ filibuster. It did OK on the blog, nothing special. Evan Hansen of Medium reached out asking if I wanted to republish there. I couldn’t think of a good reason to do that, but then I also couldn’t think of a good reason not to. So here’s a blogger’s-eye view of being a Medium author.
The Medium version is Don’t Mess With Them and it’s better than my version, because I did a couple more editing passes and tightened things up. Also, the presentation over there is terrific; minimal and very readable.
The Medium authoring environment is excellent, gets right out of the way. Everything I wanted to do was easy, with zero learning curve.
The piece was written on the 26th. I have some tens of thousands of feed subscribers; it’s hard to measure, since I like the wide-open freedom of constructing and serving my own feed. Some of them probably read the piece but, since it’s a full-content feed, there’s no need for them to visit the blog. In addition, something over 1250 people came from somewhere external and read the piece.
The Medium version has had 455 reads.
There’s too much stuff on Medium. My piece got more or less exactly zero notice until it got promoted to the Editor’s Picks stream. I wonder why Medium would want to publish something if it weren’t an editor’s pick? There are millions of places on the Net to do self-publishing.
Will I publish on Medium again? Honestly, I’m not sure. I’m 100% happy with my own little space on the Web right here; but everyone should try new things sometimes.
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Eran Sandler (Jul 01 2013, at 00:45)
I was invited to write at Medium as well and was (is) pondering if it should be why I shouldn't write at Medium again.
Honestly, I don't mind cross posting so copy-and-paste publishing is ok. If that all it ends up to be they can just as well be an aggregator.
They do say that the writer retains the copyright but grants them the right to do whatever they want with the content. Personally, I prefer to be in control of my data so aggregating and cross-posting is going to be my way of working with these services.
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