publishing

Medium DONE

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You’ve probably come across the website called Medium. All kinds of people and organizations have used Medium to publish their articles. It feels a bit like a huge blog, with a variety of interesting, and sometimes famous, people posting articles. It all seemed just so wonderful.

Until it wasn’t wonderful anymore. Suddenly Medium put up a paywall thing, and it won’t let readers view more than five articles until they sign up. And now Medium has removed a feature, without a whole lot of notice. Niemanlab.org explains: Medium abruptly cancels the membership programs of its 21 remaining subscription publisher partners.

The thing about using somebody else’s “free” service to publish your stuff is that you are not in control of your own content, or how it is handled. It seems that this lesson is one that people on the internet keep forgetting, and having to re-learn. Now many are realizing that Medium is not a benevolent charity, and that their business model involves making money from the content you provide for free.

There is a lot to be said for publishing your own content on your own website.

Yellow journalism: the “fake news” of the 19th century

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You’ll want to read this because it’s timely, interesting, and oh MY, the vintage editorial cartoons are fantastic. From the Public Domain Review: Yellow Journalism: The “Fake News” of the 19th Century.

It is perhaps not so surprising to hear that the problem of “fake news” — media outlets adopting sensationalism to the point of fantasy — is nothing new. Although, as Robert Darnton explained in the NYRB recently, the peddling of public lies for political gain (or simply financial profit) can be found in most periods of history dating back to antiquity, it is in the late 19th-century phenomenon of “Yellow Journalism” that it first seems to reach the widespread outcry and fever pitch of scandal familiar today. Why yellow? The reasons are not totally clear. Some sources point to the yellow ink the publications would sometimes use, though it more likely stems from the popular Yellow Kid cartoon that first ran in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, and later William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal, the two newspapers engaged in the circulation war at the heart of the furore. [continue]