I confess I haven't ever followed Medium. I don't use it, and I don't understand what's supposed to make it different from other publishing options like Twitter and Blogger. I did see 2 headlines just now at the top of my favorite link-gathering site Memeorandum.
The first is "Medium Editorial Team Update" at Medium itself, written by Ev Williams. This piece is incredibly dense and wordy, a style that makes me suspicious. What are you trying to hide/finesse?
I retreated to Wikipedia to read about Medium. There was no update showing the latest news, but I did learn that Evan Williams is the person who developed Twitter and also that he was the co-founder of Blogger. Clicking through on his name, I see that he is credited with coining the term "blogger," which you might think is something that I would know. Some additional clicking got me to the information that someone else coined the term "blog," but Williams goes down in the history of social media language for being the person who added the suffix that referred to the type of person.
The other headline at Memeorandum is "Medium Tells Journalists to Feel Free to Quit After Busting Union Drive/After what workers describe as a successful union-busting campaign, Ev Williams has announced to journalists who work for him that they should feel free to go" (Vice). Now, that's clear. Clear and clearly opinionated.
But I searched for Williams's name in the news and have turned up a NYT article, "Medium Offers Buyouts to Editorial Employees/A top executive is leaving the company, which announced plans to shift its focus from its own publications to writers who use its platform." So that's where I will start (and if you wonder why I read the NYT, this is a good example of why).
The "top executive" who is leaving is not Williams, but Siobhan O’Connor.
Evan Williams, a Twitter co-founder who started Medium in 2012, explained in a long email to the staff after the meeting that Medium was “making some changes” to its publishing strategy. He said Medium would reduce the budgets of the publications run by the company and redirect resources to supporting independent writers on the platform....
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....
Less than a month ago, a union drive at Medium failed. The Medium Workers Union fell one vote short of a simple majority of workers needed for union recognition....
Where's the "union busting"? I take it the unionization effort failed. I'm guessing the story at Vice is that these new changes are designed to fend off future unionizing success. The NYT eschews any talk of that.
I go back to Vice to explore my suspicion:
Employees at the company say that journalists who work at Medium’s nine publications were not the initial driving force behind the union, but were some of the most vocal supporters of it....
Medium hired the unionbusting firm Kauff McGuire & Margolis in the leadup to the February union vote. Williams also held “coffee chats” with small groups of workers, where four current employees told Motherboard that Williams said that it would be difficult to raise money from venture capitalists if the union won the vote.
“He mentioned in the all hands and the coffee chat that the VCs he talked to would not fund us if we unionized,” one current employee said. “This is awfully close to a ‘threat,’ which you can’t do, but just toes the line because he’s not saying ‘we’ll lose funding,’ he’s saying ‘I talked to someone who said we’ll lose funding.’”...
In his [March 23] email, Williams announced that the company's editorial strategy would be shifting away from a focus on publications.... Over the last several years, Medium, formerly a blogging platform, has invested heavily in hiring career journalists—writers, editors, and audience development experts—to create professional publications with specific editorial missions....
The move feels in some ways to emulate parts of the individual-based strategy that Substack has championed in the past few months, offering to showcase individual writers and provide them with deals and some support....
A current Medium employee said they believe that the move was retaliation for unionizing: “Editorial was the department that supported the union most vocally and visibly ... this is coming basically a month after a failed union drive preceded by pretty blatant union busting tactics by management.”
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51 comments:
Newspaper unions and guilds used to dominate that media. I kind of grew up around them in Madison. My dad’s typographical union in Madison went on strike in 1977 and the guild (writers) went out too in sympathy. That was the beginning of the end. I’m surprised there is anything left in the legacy media let alone any new medium.
I'd never heard of Medium. In looking at the Wikipedia article, I did recognize a couple of their publications.
The seemingly key sentence in the Wikipedia article: "As of 2019, Medium is not profitable."
Just curious - why do writers feel the need to unionize?
Think of a union is X and Y joining together to get more rights against Z than they had individually.
Apply to everyday life, say your neighbors gaining rights against you about the involuntary distribution of your property.
That's why the guy who owns the company doesn't want a union.
The term "union busting" is a misnomer as it signifies "busting" or eliminating an existing union, which is not the case. No one's head was busted in order to make the union go away.
As for retaliation, I doubt it. If the current business model works, you wouldn't change it now that the vote was won, at least not now.
Clearly, monetizing the current model of paid employee writers wasn't working. It's time to try a different model.
so...
Division pushes for union.... Division is closed down?
That is: The Oldest Story in the World
I never think of Medium except when it shows up in my twitter feed, and I rarely click on the link. Like you, I don’t see how it’s different from all the other long-form “news/opinion” opinion sites out there. Quillette is another. I rarely click on any of them.
I suspect Substack will kill them all because it has writers whose names I recognize—that’s how my clicks work. If you want me to click based on the subject, keep it short. If you want me to read something long, it has to be an interesting subject covered by a writer I’m familiar with.
...but sources say people on the zoom were crying. If people were crying how can they get away with this?
Are writers not salaried, with ample benefits? And are they not nominally intelligent enough to understand the way capitalism works wrt employment-at-will? I can understand hourly wage earners banding together to increase their agency and clout. I don’t get why salaried people would opt for it. Seems they have too much to lose.
Also I think if a writer is any good, and most think they are, they would want to differentiate themselves from other writers to increase their own salary via merit. The union would dampen any increase, no?
Some of the labor laws surrounding union organizing are in for a re-do. Ben Domenech is currently being sued by the NLRB because he said on Twitter something like "People at the Federalists know if they tried to form a union, I would send them to the salt mines!" This is considered union busting and he's in trouble for it and the trouble has been hanging over his head for years.
The union hasn't done any good for the NYT writers who were kicked out, but it was something to hide behind when they didn't like a certain Senator's view point being published in their paper.
Mostly, I think people should be able to join unions, but companies should also have freedom of expression and association if they don't want to deal with a union. I don't think a company should be forced to negotiate or hire people only from an entity that makes money (big money!) only as a third party to their business.
All I know about Medium is they published the professor who said Russia probably changed votes in the 2016 election. And Quilllette is supposedly really awful for some anti-trans reason, even though Dan Savage published there the other day.
Really, journalists and journalist-adjacent are really awful people on Twitter and seemingly in business.
From the northbound expressway you could see the newsroom of The Boston Globe. I must confess I had happy vibes seeing lying torn in half as they were taking it down to build luxury apartments...
What happens if AB5 becomes national law?
There is such a large scramble around publishing opinion writers these days. Medium, Quillette, Unherd, Patreon, Substack, others that I cannot think of off the top of my head but appear in my in-box from time to time. Splashing out opinions is one thing. Being a profitable business is often entirely something else.
I love it when the unions plan, strategize, meet, coerce employees to try to get a foothold on a business and that's deemed good, American labor. But when there is a movement to oppose it, by free employees and the people running the business, it's union busting, which is considered something almost crossing the illegal line. It's a name cast to paint someone as evil.
The writing business has gotten very tricky. There are many layers to it and publishers are scrambling to be profitable while still appealing to their readers, and trying to gain new readers. Unions are so old-school. They do not fit into today's 'move quickly and be prepared to change often' psyche that business leaders have to carry.
Also I note that on every one of these 'we're letting some of you go now' Zoom meetings, there are crying employees. They're so used to having their way. I don't recall crying when being let go of a position. Maybe that's just me.
They're not workers.
Hmm. I always thought Medium was a platform. I had no idea they had journalists on payroll.
Evan Williams is from Clarks, Nebraska. He’s rich enough to buy the entire county and he may well have.
I work in the administration of a home-health-care agency. Union organizers occasionally try to create labor unions in such agencies.
This happened a few years ago to our agency. The president hired such a union-busting business, which explained to our home-health- care aides why they should vote against forming a union. Essentially, they would destroy their own jobs if they did form a union.
Our aides did vote against forming the union.
The union-busting business knew the relevant labor laws and knew how to explain the argument to our aides legally.
It is all Grub Street, which is a pejorative term for impoverished hack writers and writings of low literary value. See Pope's Dunciad.
MayBee said...Mostly, I think people should be able to join unions, but companies should also have freedom of expression and association if they don't want to deal with a union
The employer/employee relationship is naturally unbalanced as the employer has far more power, while the employee is much more at the employer's mercy (the libertarian vision of the tradesman bargaining for the value of his services is a fantasy for the vast majority). Unions, at their most basic level, help balance out this power imbalance so that a fairer relationship can emerge. In practice, that balance that never holds for long.
In the private sector, market forces keep the sides from getting too out of whack. If the company becomes too dysfunctional, it goes into decline and, eventually, bankruptcy. In the public sector, market forces are irrelevant. Which is why public sector unions should not be legal--they operate in an environment dramatically different from that faced by private sector unions. The natural limiters are not in place and there is nothing to stop them from spinning out of control and destroying their communities.
The writers should look on the bright side of losing their jobs- they can now pursue a life of installing solar panels or developing more efficient ways of installing plumbing.
“ The writers should look on the bright side of losing their jobs- they can now pursue a life of installing solar panels or developing more efficient ways of installing plumbing.”
You forgot coding. They can learn to code.
tim Maguire-
I agree that unions can do a lot of good for workers, but they also become their own entities with financial interests, political goals, and ideologies. Do you think the current Democratic Party says they want to strengthen unions again because they want to support workers, or because the union leaders donate money to the Democratic Party (and in the case of the SEIU, contribute manpower to their protests and voter drives?). So why should a company legally be forced to deal with *that*? The political levers fight against the market forces.
Public sector unions should indeed not exist. It is ridiculous to think that we should be subjected to a government that its own workers need protection from.
I was going to make a Learn to code snark but Brice Hayden beat me to it. That said, I think everyone should learn to code. I did in the 1980’s on a Commodore 64, made some money writing about it in the C64 mags of the day, and still code for pleasure . The most satisfying world I populate is the world of coding logic, where no screaming Marxists dwell, no TV commercials try to re-educate me on race, no virtuous lawn signs condemn.
Coding is soul cleansing. Try it.
Mostly, I think people should be able to join unions, but companies should also have freedom of expression and association if they don't want to deal with a union.
This has always been my thought as well. Freedom of association should run both ways, and if a business doesn't want to deal with a union, they shouldn't have to. If employees have a skill that is valuable enough, a company would have no choice but to deal with the union. However, they wouldn't have to give concessions to fungible low-skill workers.
Blogger MayBee said...
something like "People at the Federalists know if they tried to form a union, I would send them to the salt mines!"
If he had said something like "Send them to the cotton fields" he would be reviled as a racist.
Yet 10s of millions of black, subsaharan Africans, sold into slavery by their black brethren, were literally worked to death in the salt mines of Persia, Turkey and other eastern countries. Those that did not die on the journey, as many as 50% is estimated, could expect to live no more than a year to 18 months in the salt mines.
Why is BenDo not cancelled for this obviously racist comment?
Oh, I understand now. Those blacks mainly came from the east side of the African continent. Nothing to do with any American blacks whose ancestors came from the west side of the continent. Not kin? Fuck 'em.
But BenDo is still a despicable racist if he made that saltmines comment
John Henry
Fue una broma, john henry, medium had some interesting pieces debunking crowdstrike affirmations
"The employer/employee relationship is naturally unbalanced as the employer has far more power, while the employee is much more at the employer's mercy"
How so? The employer can terminate the employee and the employee can quit the job whenever the arrangement stops being beneficial to either party. Seems pretty equal to me.
I guess I understand your devotion to the Times and the Post now. They're easier to find and their names are easier to remember.
All the cookie cutter webzines may as well all be saying the same thing and probably are.
It is a broken industry.
The United Auto Workers Union destroyed the US auto industry and funded the Tom Hayden branch of the Democrat party. Both good reasons to have nothing to do with unions.
They were crying because the game of musical chairs for writers is getting faster and faster and they sense (correctly) that they are not interesting enough to compete with the unorthodox thinkers like Sullivan, Greenwald, Taibbi, etc.
Note the important journalism that we'll be missing (from the Vice article:
Those publications have published high-impact work over the years: An investigation by tech publication OneZero into a surveillance tech executive’s attendance at KKK meetings led to his firing, for example.
How will we survive without "news" like that?
The "top executive" who is leaving is not Williams, but Siobhan O’Connor.
Crazy bald chick. I guess that tearing up a picture of the pope thing finally got to people.
Doc Mike parrots the Davos Billionaires mantra like the useful idiot useless eater he is
I will never understand multi-billionaires who go on to work at other companies.
Fund them? Found them? Sure.
But let some other schmuck run them day-to-day.
Do you really want to be earning $200k/day and not be living an incredible life?
Sure...stop by the office...go to a few meetings. But otherwise...
Maybe it's just me...
Learn to code, motherfuckers.
More like learn to build an audience and monetize it, in this era of the sovereign writer which Medium is responding to.
C'mon, Al Gore invented 'weblog' then shortened it. Like he did w/Albert.
My wife writes on Meduim. It is like Blogger, but tends to be longer writing than the typical blog post. Also, they take care of monitization: they place the ads, they collect the revenue, and you get paid based on page views.
My wife says the income supports her coffee habit, not much more. It did get her noticed by an NYT editor, which got her an OpEd in the NYTs.
"The most satisfying world I populate is the world of coding logic, where no screaming Marxists dwell, no TV commercials try to re-educate me on race, no virtuous lawn signs condemn.
Coding is soul cleansing. Try it."
The very definition of white privilege and systemic racism.
Iran Iraq War. Hoping they all lose
I see from the Wikipedia article about Medium that they added Colin Kaepernick to their board less than a year ago, to collaborate on a couple of the verticals they are now cutting back on.
tim maguire said...
The employer/employee relationship is naturally unbalanced as the employer has far more power
That's only true when there's a weak job market, rather than a tight one.
Trump brought about a strong, tight, job market where employees had much more power. He did this by going after illegal aliens, and by not giving companies everything they wanted on the legal immigration front.
note that the Democrats are now working to make sure that job market is weak, with lots of foreign competition.
It's almost like "only an idiot votes for Democrats". either that, or someone who's going to be hiring, not the hired.
@M Jordan:
The most satisfying world I populate is the world of coding logic, where no screaming Marxists dwell, no TV commercials try to re-educate me on race, no virtuous lawn signs condemn.
^^^ Indeed.
M Jordan, APress publishes a book called Retro Coding for kids. You download a Commodore 64 emulator and learn to code in BASIC exactly the way we did. Great trip down memory lane. And a good starting point for those who want to learn to code but aren't ready to work with a fully equiped IDE.
I get the "medium daily digest" in my inbox.
Today it pushes the story "America Must Understand How Bad Trump Truly Was in Order to See What’s Coming," by some fellow named Sikander Hayat Khan. The first paragraph reads:
Seldom do you come across a man who changed so much in so little time. His efforts normalised authoritarian tendencies, legitimised fascism, and shaped the future of one of America’s two political parties. With the GOP focused on its quest for voter suppression, Trump’s increase in popularity, and the party’s adoption of Naziism, America’s future hangs on the outcome of the midterms. But in order to fully understand where it’s going, America must first understand where it’s been.
It's woke gobbledy-gook, something like reading a newsletter from some religious cult you know nothing about. This article is typical of the fare found on any of the Medium web imprints, useless stuff written by useless people.
Blogger I'm Not Sure said...
"The employer/employee relationship is naturally unbalanced as the employer has far more power, while the employee is much more at the employer's mercy"
How so? The employer can terminate the employee and the employee can quit the job whenever the arrangement stops being beneficial to either party. Seems pretty equal to me.
3/24/21, 8:43 AM
Only so long as the employer can replace the employee as easily as the employee can replace the employer.
If the bosses have their way, they will sell their product in a seller's market, and use every trick in the book to create one: monopolistic IP laws, market barriers, etc.
And they will buy labor in a buyers market, where the commodity (e.g. labor) has no ability to use IP laws or other market barriers to keep out the competition.
Usually the bosses have the upper hand in this because they command more resources than any individual employee.
Many companies don't want to unionize and so, in what they offer to their employees, they carefully stay ahead of what unionized companies offer. This is the "leverage" which the non-unionized have but it only applies to employees with superior skills who get hired for that superiority by the non-unionized companies on the assumption that having a more skillful workforce will enable the company to out-produce unionized competitors. I have no idea Whether these considerations apply to a dying industry like lefty news (whether lefty print or some other lefty medium.) Ultimately, you have to have customers and show a profit. The best way to do this is to insult potential customers and the lefty layoffs are coming in just those venues populated by the most insulting writers. So critical race theory is right.
If Medium didn't hire thugs to come in with baseball bats or to make midnight home visits, then there was no "union busting".
"If the bosses have their way..."
And if the workers have their way, they'll use the law for their benefit, too.
"Usually the bosses have the upper hand in this because they command more resources than any individual employee."
Companies have more resources, workers have more flexibility. A company can't just pull up stakes and move across the country the way a worker can. A worker can decide on a whim to change careers, it's much more difficult for a company to shift focus from their current market to a new one.
There are benefits and drawbacks on both sides of the table.
M Jordan said...
I was going to make a Learn to code snark but Brice Hayden beat me to it. That said, I think everyone should learn to code. I did in the 1980’s on a Commodore 64, made some money writing about it in the C64 mags of the day, and still code for pleasure.
Commodore 64 BASIC programming is flat out useless in today's world so your snark of a snark isn't even believable nowadays. Despite the fact that Commodore sold a record 17 million boxes (that I hesitate to call computers), none have been sold since 1994 when the company went bankrupt. Sophisticated modern programs and games are cheap, sometimes free and usually instantly available online. Professional programmers combined talents to write these gems.
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