Member-only story
Medium: Please Put People Over Publications!
A well-curated publication helps find writers to follow, but the focus is always on the reader-writer relationship — or should be.
The New Home Page
I love the new Home page. Others think it “sucks.”
The Good: I love the section that clearly shows recent activity by writers I follow! The overall look is cleaner and helps to surface more of what I care about. The fact that I stopped following large publications, and follow mainly small ones and individual writers, has a lot to do with the stories that appear on my Home page, now, too.
The Bad: For stories in publications, the authors’ bylines are missing! Writers hate this. It’s not doing publications any favors, either, if you think about it — writers are already threatening to withdraw their stories from publications, publish to eponymous publications of their own, or use the sub-title for a byline. Clever, but it defeats the real point of a sub-title. The lack of an author byline in whatever metadata gets passed to Facebook or other social media platforms has always been a bit of a sore point with me. If I share my Medium stories to my personal Facebook profile, I have to preface it with “I wrote this!” or my friends can’t be bothered to click…
