7 Takeaways On The Future Of Medium From An Interview With Its New CEO, Tony Stubblebine
Psssttt: Incentives!
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If you read or write on this platform, you’ve likely heard that Ev Williams is stepping down as CEO and the role went to Tony Stubblebine.
Medium writer Sinem Günel hosted a live interview with Tony in her private Facebook group on Thursday, and she did a great job asking the questions writers would want addressed. It’s worth listening to the interview, but here are my key takeaways on the future of Medium.
He’s truly excited to take on the job
Tony has been a Medium member, writer, and publication owner for 10 years, and clearly has a lot of respect for the platform. At some point in the months-long interviewing process it struck him that “they might actually choose me.” and speaks of getting “a jolt of adrenaline” about the fact that he could make a difference “on a product and community I love.”
It was heart-warming to hear and it’s clear he thinks Medium has more potential than has been actualized to this point.
He’s currently “on a listening tour”
Tony says he’s holding off on major decisions while he embarks on a listening tour. This has several components — including reading member comments on the post he made about accepting the CEO role.
He’s also having group meetings in-person with the Medium staff. The first was in San Francisco and he hopes to have similar meetings in New York, Los Angeles, and Paris, the employee hubs. Interesting aside, Medium staff are fully remote now.
One thing I found gratifying is that Tony intends to put systems in place to listen to the community on an ongoing basis. This is something I’ve long felt Medium is lacking. He hasn’t yet solidified what this will entail.
He has a somewhat old-school approach to Medium
One of the most common comments members left on his post was an interest in higher quality output from writers (or, to use his term, authors). Building on that, Tony spoke of his interest in further distributing and incentivizing expertise on the platform and giving publications a bigger role to play.
I must admit, I was taken aback by his description of ideal Medium writing. He used the analogy that you should write what you know deeply, and suggested writing “with your book in mind.”
This seems like a very 2020 perception of Medium. While expert-based advice is still prominent here, many have moved on to more personal forms of expression.
When Sinem questioned him about what his approach would be for other, non-expert-based forms of writing (e.g. poetry and essays), he said he was less familiar with that side of the platform at this point. But he did acknowledge that expertise can extend to lived experience.
I don’t want to upset anyone with this point, because Tony reports he’s still familiarizing himself with what the platform has become and is keeping himself open during the process.
He’s interested in writers being incentivized
Tony’s focused on incentivizing writers to write what serves the current and potential readership base. His focus is on serving current readers and attracting new ones.
He also spoke of rewarding external marketing that attracts a new readership.
His definition of the words “incentive” and “reward” seems broad because he spoke of them in the context of curation and distribution (and thus, reads) but also left it open to mean other things.
He also spoke about an experiment involving writer tips that would be coming soon but mentioned that it would be in the test phase only to see how it performs.
He feels distribution/curation needs some re-working
Tony acknowledged that being chosen for distribution doesn’t have the impact that curation once did. He felt the system needed to be re-worked. Although he hadn’t determined what that meant, he said distribution was at one point so widely given that it had very little tangible impact.
He wants to bring back mobile editing
When Sinem mentioned many writers were upset that the mobile editing function was removed, he said he felt this function was important and would likely be re-visited. However, he cautioned that due to programming, it couldn’t simply be restored with the push of a button, so it won’t be an immediate change.
He’ll be keeping us up to speed
Tony mentioned that he appreciates feedback. In the interest of transparency, he’ll be writing more about his process and part of his interest in doing that is to collect feedback along the way.
Overall
Overall, I felt good about Tony’s approach and of course, I wish him well in this endeavor. Hopefully, he can appreciate that some of the changes in Medium over the past two years have been very positive for the platform and its reader base.
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