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Jumping on Bandwagons

Some thoughts on recent “debacles” and the timeliness of a story

Imagine you’re trying to catch a ride on the back of a truck. The truck seems to be moving slowly. You hesitate. You leap. Only to land, face first, in the muddy ruts of the wheels as the truck speeds away.

Photo by Isabell Winter on Unsplash

This is the visual I get, watching people publish articles on old happenings — sometimes just one or two day old happenings, as the world moves quickly, whether we do or not. “Breaking news,” but three days late. You have to wake up and jump much faster than that if you hope to be a journalist.

Now, if you wrote about Medium’s new Terms of Service, or the recent content theft (there have been at least two wholesale, behind-the-MPP scrapings of Medium in the past month, alone — did you know that?), or the random and unreasonable Facebook block of Medium links, or any other outrage-worthy topic, have you gone back to check your facts and update your stories for new readers?

The TOS Up

You see, Medium was very responsive to their members’ concerns. Not only did they reply to most of us by email in under 24 hours, they published a blog post clarifying the rationale for their changes. When…