Member-only story
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 it was a job, and I could live on it.
It’s December of 2023, and I’m losing my job at Medium again. The program that pays me is folding. I’ve loved working here, for all eight years I’ve been here — and Gluck has, in fact, been ceaselessly and sincerely supportive of my work. He’s a joy to work with and a joy to know. I bear no anger or ill will to anyone involved; this particular job loss is just a reflection of where the industry is right now. I get that, and I have plans to survive it.
That said, I do have thoughts about the industry, and what led us to this point. For the past three years, I’ve been set loose: Given an advance and allowed to write, roughly, whatever the fuck I want. I don’t have an editor, and I don’t have to convince anyone that a story is newsworthy before I publish it. Sometimes this has been good, because I’ve been able to take chances and pursue stories with no obvious hook. Sometimes I’ve climbed up my own…
