The End of Me(dium)
I’m leaving Medium. Here’s what I’m proud of, and what has changed.
In March of 2021, I lost my job at Medium. I had been working as a columnist at GEN, the site’s power-and-politics vertical. I had two great, diligent editors who expected the best of me — Max Ufberg and Garance Franke-Ruta — and would not let me stop working until they got it. I had deadlines to hit twice a month. I had a growing audience. I had just gotten a raise. I was feeling good.
I found out that Medium was getting rid of its editorial division — which meant the end of GEN, which meant the end of me — in a Tweet. It was spectacularly bad timing. I’d just turned down a Substack Pro advance, on the grounds of the site’s management being weird right-wing Nazi-fostering dipshits who were trying to buy me off to silence trans people’s criticism of their policies. My Substack revenues were what I’d been counting on to pull me through any period of unemployment, since, if you’re freelance, you can’t just file like everybody else.
I spent about a week in limbo — one job I’d refused, one job I’d lost, no jobs in sight. Then, Max Ufberg told me that the guy who was running the site’s new writer program, Jon Gluck, was a fan of my work, and that I could probably get a deal to write a blog here. It would be more deadlines, and maybe a bit less pay, but…
