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Final Departures

Some sad news, and a goodbye post, several weeks in advance of the actual goodbye.

Jude Ellison S. Doyle
5 min readOct 12, 2023
A person in a ghost costume waves goodbye. They’re on some sort of very high cliff overlooking a lake, so clearly they died in Nature.
Here’s me at my other newsletter platform. Photo by Tandem X Visuals on Unsplash

I’m writing this on a plane crossing the Atlantic Ocean. I’m in the dead center of the cabin — no windows or aisles on either side, only people — but if I could see out the window, I know I would see only ocean and only sky. I’m in between places, which feels like being nowhere, and that seems like a good place to start this post: I’m leaving Medium.

The terms of my contract with Medium have changed a few times, in the roughly eight (eight!) years I’ve been here, but since the summer of 2020, the deal has been that I get a monthly advance of a little over two thousand dollars, based on projected traffic, plus whatever I earn over that amount through traffic itself. For the record, I’ve out-earned my advance every month. The program itself, though, is ending. I’ll keep filing this column more or less weekly until the end of the year, and then — along with every other writer on the program, as far as I understand it — I’ll be done.

This isn’t a surprise. Medium famously changes models a lot, from publication to open-platform and back again. In the past year, I’ve seen several friends leave, including Katelyn Burns, who has a huge following, and John DeVore, who was here long before me. If they were leaving, all of us were in…

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Jude Ellison S. Doyle
Jude Ellison S. Doyle

Written by Jude Ellison S. Doyle

Author of “Trainwreck” (Melville House, ‘16) and “Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers” (Melville House, ‘19). Columns published far and wide across the Internet.

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