Platforms are Not Your Friends

This column is bittersweet: It’s my last one writing for Medium as part of the program in which I was a founding writer. It’s also about not putting all of your content eggs in one single content basket.

As a person formerly of “working in a classically volatile industry” experience, I am all too familiar with the highs, lows, and pitfalls of digital journalism, which has come to rely heavily on platforms as a survival mechanism. I survived the notorious Facebook “pivot to video,” I survived the period after “pivot to video,” when internal documents that Meta (nee Facebook) had that were made public by a lawsuit suggested Meta massively overestimated the average viewing time for video ads on its platform, but scared publishers into changing their editorial strategies anyway. I have survived Google rejiggering SEO updates, sometimes arbitrarily punishing news outlets who had come to rely on traffic from Google. I have seen newsrooms become reliant on funding from VCs, scour the earth for alternative revenue streams, and sometimes sell themselves to private equity vultures. I have watched as Substack poured money and resources into freelancers’ pockets, luring them away from the grind of freelancing for journalism outlets, only for that money to disappear when VC funding for things like newsletter startups dried up.

Two years ago Medium, another platform and one that has been through myriad pivots, mass layoffs and iterations of its own, came to me to ask me to write for them. It wouldn’t be exclusive — I could continue writing…