Final Departures

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

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…