Was it Mark Twain who said, “I’d have written you a shorter letter if I’d had more time?” One of the golden rules of good writing is to cut out the superfluous. This should be even more important today as attention spans continue to shrink. You have six seconds before someone leaves your website. That’s how quickly they judge whether they’ve found what they were looking for.
With a loud and crowded blogosphere and millions of people on social networks, all of which clamoring for attention, we’ve gotten more crass, vulgar, and shocking. I recently wrote an article on Upworthy which spends all their time tinkering with headlines, trying to get you to dig deeper. Blogger and Twitter innovator Ev Williams want you to sit still longer.
Williams started as a copywriter and worked his way into freelance coding. He founded Blogger in the late 1990s (sold to Google in 2003) and co-created Twitter. Williams has been on his own for three years. A year ago he started Medium.
What is Medium?
Medium is a home for “well thought out articles that can generate meaningful compensation for their respective authors.” He said they were looking for a way to get ideas and stories out there where they’d have “more than a snowball’s chance in hell of getting the audience (they) deserve.”
One interesting difference of Medium is that readers can comment on specific paragraphs, rather than just at the end of an article. In the future they plan to release a way to allow writers to collaborate on articles via Google Docs. Stories are grouped under broad collections by theme, rather than by author.
As of yet authors are seeing not much in the way of pay, but a novel level of interaction with readers. Long-time war correspondent, David Axe, says Medium “is a great, solid, easy-to-use platform that deliberately limits style choices in the interest of simplicity.”
Williams was pessimistic about the state of media and wanted to encourage great writing rather than the sensationalism that fights for reader eyeballs. Medium will focus on average on site time, which is said to be increasing. Williams said, “We don’t pretend that we can make people eat their vegetables when there’s potato chips on the table, but we want to provide an alternative for those who want some diversity in their diet.”
Reader subscriptions and ad sponsors should support the site in the future. Whether they will employ journalists is yet to be decided. Another option would be to provide tools for writers such as fact-checking, copy editing, and photo editing.
Where does your content stand? What level of quality are you providing? Need help with your content calendar? Call Fletcher Consulting at 715-584-6773. Your first consultation is free.
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