Moving to Ghost

This is just a quick signpost to note that I'm moving my writing from Medium to Ghost.

As you may have seen, Medium workers allege that the company engaged in classic union busting tactics when workers there tried to unionize. Not cool!

Further, the company's CEO said they were going to switch publication strategies...again. As someone who has been doing paid writing on Medium as a side-gig for a few years, this is a bit baffling to me. Medium reportedly had 700,000 paid subscribers and has been taking in more than $35 million in annual revenue. In online magazine terms, that's a wild success. But tech CEOs don't think like magazine publishers.

All the editors I worked with at Medium have been helpful and I've gotten notes from several who are moving on in the wake of these changes. I just feel bad for them all around. Journalism is an unstable industry already, but Medium's leadership really jerked them around.

I selected Ghost because it seems well built to handle free publications, paid subscriptions and integration with other services I've used like Patreon and Mailchimp. It's also a non-profit, so I hope it's more sustainable as a publication ecosystem. They also set up a concierge service (fancy!) for people moving their posts over from Medium, so how could I say no? Substack is interesting and there are a lot of good writers, there, but I'm also not interested in supporting a company that dismissed valid complaints about anti-trans harassment on their platform.

Writing and podcasting are definitely hobbies for me and I'm glad I have an audience for them, particularly since I do most of my thinking through writing and talking things out. Because I work in political communication professionally, I'm not a journalist or a pundit, but often have a perspective on how political arguments function that seems useful to audiences, particularly other people who work in and around politics. Importantly, these are perspectives grounded in experience, social science research and a lot of collaboration with experts and activists. They're often not what you'd seen in op-ed pages or columns precisely because traditional outlets tend to value novel or contrarian perspectives, which often treat politics like a spectator sport ("they should have run the ball!" ) and less like a high-stakes struggle for power and resources that deeply affects people's lives.

I'll send out a more comprehensive note once I get all the integrations set up here, but glad to have a non-Twitter outlet for writing again.