📈 Digital Publishing News (March 2021)

Medium served Joe Biden Pornographic Articles, Substack raises new round of funding while battling an onslaught of criticism, and other top stories from the digital publishing industry

Apr 01, 2021

Hey everyone!

March was a month filled with a lot of updates for the digital publishing industry.

Here are some of the best articles I read covering digital publishing news, trends, and predictions. I’ve also included a list of all of the Blogging Guide articles published across multiple platforms, from March (ICYMI).

View Blogging Guide Blog

Medium

Joe Biden Porn Issue

Medium has faced several scandals in the past month. Perhaps most embarrassing was that President Joe Biden was served porn while trying to use the official Medium POTUS account:

Last week, a partnerships manager at Medium working with the White House found that there was a strange problem with the platform: President Joe Biden was being served porn.
The manager was in a video conference with a White House staffer to discuss how Biden, who had used Medium as a campaign blog in 2020, could begin posting to the official Medium @POTUS account. While sharing his screen with the White House, the staffer logged in to @POTUS and saw the first article recommended to him by Medium: “A is for After,” which a sub-headline described as “a cuckold love story.”
It’s unclear if the White House saw the story. But after the meeting, the Medium staffer tried to improve Biden’s recommendations. He followed political topics; he “read” posts by President Obama and Vice President Kamala Harris while logged as the president. When he refreshed his recommendations, Medium recommended another piece of erotica: “Getting a Piece (and Some Pizza Too),” a story that carries the sub-headline “step sister taboo erotica.”
The employee previously found that Medium had somehow added Biden as a writer on 10 “garbage publications,” as well as at least one software development blog. “President Joe Biden is Being Served Erotica on Medium.com,” the staffer complained in an internal post.
The episode captured Medium in all its complexity: a publishing platform used by the most powerful people in the world; an experiment in mixing highbrow and lowbrow in hopes a sustainable business will emerge; and a devotion to algorithmic recommendations over editorial curation that routinely caused the company confusion and embarrassment.

—Platformer

Medium Company Turmoil

Medium CEO Ev Williams announced in a blog post Tuesday that the company is undergoing yet another major transition, this time away from the editorial publications it started just two years ago.
As it pursues its latest business strategy, Medium is offering all editorial employees the option to "get off this crazy ride" in the form of a voluntary severance program, Williams said.
Medium Vice President of Editorial Siobhan O'Connor is also leaving as part of the transition. She joined the company in 2018.
BuzzFeed News reported in 2017 that, in its first five years alone, Medium had "tried and discarded at least five business models."
Starting in 2019, Medium launched several in-house editorial publications, including tech and science publication OneZero, health and wellness publication Elemental, and Zora, which focuses on the experiences of women of color.
But just two years into his latest experiment, Williams said that model won't be Medium's future.
"What's worked less well is where we've followed the traditional editorial playbook - specifically, commissioning stories from professional writers into publications with broad mandates," Williams said in the blog post, adding that Medium wasn't "near where we need to be to make it work economically."
"For the foreseeable future, we will focus that talent on supporting independent voices on our platform. This means identifying writers - both already on Medium and not - and offering them deals, support, editing, and feedback to help them tell great stories and find their audience," he said, alluding to a model more similar to the publishing platform Substack.

Failed Employee Unionization / Employee Buyout

But the timing of the move - which came just weeks after employees fell one vote short of unionizing - also raised suspicion among many.

During the union drive, Medium and even Williams himself discouraged employees from unionizing, according to Vice News.

Medium workers tried to unionize and failed:

Some staff members wept on the video call, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting, who were not authorized to speak publicly. Employees were told that they did not have to take the buyouts but that their jobs would most likely change if they stayed, the people said.
Those who take the buyouts will receive five months’ salary as a lump sum and six months of health benefits. The fate of the Medium publications was uncertain, with Mr. Williams saying in the email that it would take “a lot more experimentation to figure out what their role is on the platform.”

—New York Times

Medium then announced that it was offering employees a “voluntary buyout” and announcing a “leadership change”:

Last year—barely 12 months into the experiment—Williams had already grown uncomfortable with the cost of the team he had just built. Paid subscriptions, which had been on the rise, flatlined in 2020. Publication budgets were cut—and then cut again, and again. Editors who were lured to Medium on the promise of being able to build out full-fledged publications were suddenly begging for enough money to pay for a handful of freelance stories a week.

—The Verge

Substack

Substack Raises New Funding

Also this month, Substack announced is raising $65 million in new venture capital funding that would value the company at around $650 million. Existing investor Andreessen Horowitz is leading the round.

Substack Continues to Receive Criticism for Content Moderation Policies

Substack was also in the news, due to practices that have become controversial, including who it chooses to pay directly and its relatively loose content moderation policies.

Rather, what roiled media Twitter was the revelation that Substack poached some of its big-name columnists by providing them with a guaranteed minimum income for their first year on the platform. This arrangement isn’t philanthropic. In exchange for guaranteeing Yglesias a base salary of $250,000, Substack reportedly required him to let the platform collect 85 percent of the gross subscription revenue his newsletter generated; had he declined this offer and accepted the standard terms of service available to all Substack users, the platform would have claimed only 10 percent of such revenue. Ultimately, opting for Substack’s star treatment will cost the columnist hundreds of thousands of dollars. It is not clear how many of Substack’s top writers secured similar deals, as the platform does not mandate such disclosure from all the writers it directly finances.
In a much-discussed Substack post, the journalist and fiction writer Annalee Newitz argued that this policy rendered the platform a “scam.” Specifically, Newitz contends that by secretly providing salaries to certain elite pundits, Substack is effectively scamming less-established journalists into thinking that newsletter writing is more remunerative than it actually is. (Newitz also argues that by withholding the names of these elite pundits, the platform is effectively maintaining a secret editorial policy that is contrary to journalistic ethics in principle, and harmful to trans people and cis women in practice. But this is a distinct argument that isn’t germane to my purposes here.)

Vocal.Media

Vocal+ subscribers double in less than three months; this milestone comes nearly one month ahead of management's projections. The Company reaffirms its expectation to reach over 100,000 Vocal+ subscribers by year-end 2021.

Additionally, the Company has announced that beginning today, the total number of Vocal+ subscribers will be publicly displayed on Vocal: https://vocal.media/vocal-plus. At the time of publication, Vocal+ subscribers totaled over 23,200.
Commented Creatd CEO Jeremy Frommer, "Creators are increasingly recognizing Vocal as their premiere destination, providing an all-in-one solution to their content needs. Now, having crossed to over 20,000 Vocal+ members and 900,000 freemium Vocal creators, we are well on pace to achieve our stated goal of reaching 100,000 paying Vocal+ subscribers by year-end."

Wattpad

Wattpad, the global multi-platform entertainment company for original stories and leading social storytelling platform, today announced the launch of Wattpad Brand Originals, a new branded entertainment offering from Wattpad Brand Partnerships. Wattpad Brand Originals will develop branded TV series, films, podcasts, and digital media projects from hit Wattpad stories, allowing brands to tap into and collaborate with Wattpad’s world-famous long-form Influencers and global Gen Z community.

“Advertising is evolving, and brands need to find new ways to connect with Gen Z audiences that are spending more of their time in ad-free environments”
As home to one of the most diverse groups of storytellers on the planet, with five million writers and a community of 90 million readers, Wattpad is the world’s leading destination for Gen Z to write novels and long-form stories. To date nearly 1,500 Wattpad stories have been published as books or adapted for TV or film.