Did Medium Succeed?

Yesterday Ev Williams stepped aside as the CEO of Medium, ten years after he founded the company.

Pundits’ reaction to this news ranged from muted to harsh. The media narrative around Medium turned bad over the past decade as the company repeatedly changed strategies, often impacting employees and users along the way.

This week we may have seen the climax of that narrative—in the form of the most brutal headline I have read in quite a long time:

“Ev Williams gives up” is how Casey Newton put it, thereby renouncing his right to ever go back to traditional media and quit writing his Substack newsletter 😅

Casey’s post is a classic retelling of the conventional version of the Medium story: they pivoted too much and screwed over writers, they raised too much money, and they failed to achieve their overly-ambitious goal of fixing the media. This story gets a lot right, but the full truth is more interesting and complicated. It’s worth taking seriously by anyone who wants to know how traditional publishers and open platforms collide, why so many well-intentioned efforts to “save media” seem to end in disappointment, and what comes next for writers and readers on the internet.