My keynote talk for Medium Pub Crawl
How publications help writers find readers
13 min read
·
Mar 27, 2024
On Tuesday, March 19, we hosted our very first Pub Crawl, a 24-hour virtual meetup that connected Medium writers with Medium publication editors. Below is a lightly-edited transcript of my keynote remarks ? slides and all.
Hello, welcome to Medium’s first ever Pub Crawl event. I’m Tony Stubblebine. I’m the CEO here at Medium.
The purpose of today is to connect writers to publications.
The vast majority of what I’m about to talk to you about today is aimed at answering a question for writers, “Why should you work with Medium publications?”
Thematically, the answer is going to circle around one answer.
Publications help you find readers.
There are a thousand places you could publish online. But the reason to come to Medium is because we have built a system, led by Medium publications, that helps you find readers.
As I talk today, I hope you can be open to thinking about the difference between Medium bringing you
lots of readers
and Medium bringing you
the right readers
. Publications are doing both. They are the force that helps stories go viral, and they are the connecting glue between your writing and the readers who most want to read it.
I’m going to start with a story about how Medium connects readers to writers.
I’ve put on screen a post from a writer,
Sivan Hermon
. Her post is about a decision point that a lot of people reach in their career: Should you become a manager or not? I’m using this post as an example because it’s great, and also because it got a lot of readers. There’s been 41,000 total, so far.
I want to tell you the backstory of where those views came from.
Sivan is a leadership coach who has worked at Google and has an MBA from Columbia. So she is writing from a place of both experience and expertise.
In the past, she has written for several different publications on Medium, but recently has been submitting a lot of her pieces to a publication called
Code Like A Girl
. This is a great publication that’s been active on Medium for a long time.
The editor for this publication is
Dinah Davis (She/Her)
. Just so that we are all clear, this is Dinah’s publication. She doesn’t work for Medium; rather, she’s part of the community, just like the writers and readers are.
Dinah is also one of the subject matter experts who nominate for
Medium’s Boost program
. The Boost is for bringing readers to the best of the best of Medium. It’s one of ? but not the only way ? Medium brings readers to writers.
We rely on Dinah as one of the nominators in the Boost program because she knows a lot about her subject. That comes both because of experience as a practitioner and because of experience as a long-time publisher here on Medium.
So when Dinah read Sivan’s post she thought it met the bar for being Boosted. I’m going to show you a part of the Boost program that most people have never seen. The point of the Boost is to help make Medium a place where substance is more important than attention. As a result we put a lot of thought into getting every Boost decision right.
The part that most of you have never seen is that when something is nominated for a Boost, that nomination includes a note about the nominator’s thought process. The note explains why a piece is meaningful, important, and helpful.
This is an important internal artifact about how thoughtful Medium recommendations are and how they actually work.
Here’s how Dinah described the importance of this piece when she nominated it. She said:
This article is a fantastic look at figuring out if you should move from an individual contributor role to a management role. Most people assume that is the right career step, when in many cases it isn’t. I love this author’s set of questions to ask yourself to figure out if it really is for you or not.
So that’s Dinah making the case for why this is an important story for people to read. Our curators agreed, and after submitting that nomination, our curators Boosted the story.
The readers for this story didn’t come out of nowhere. Rather, they come as a result of the curation and care of a publication editor. This story had zero views when Dinah first curated it. Now it has 41,000.