Medium, the publishing platform created by Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone, has purchased Matter, the science and technology journalism platform that publishes one long story a month.
I wrote a couple of critical posts on Matter last November (here and here), mostly about problems I had downloading stories to my Kindle. One of Matter's founders, Bobbie Johnson, asked that I try the site again, because there were still "a lot of wrinkles to iron out."
Start-up issues aside, I confess that I don't get Matter. I'm always happy to see a new opportunity for science reporters to do their best work and get paid for it. But one story a month? The New Yorker does two or three good, sometimes brilliant, pieces of nonfiction a week. Throw in any number of other good magazines and websites, and we're buried in more good stories than any of us can keep up with. One new story a month is not going to change the science media landscape.
That apparently places me in stark disagreement with a couple of Twitter co-founders, who evidently liked Matter's stories so much they bought the company. I can't say I'm terribly comfortable being on the opposite side of a web issue from two Twitter guys. Could it be they know something about technology that I don't, alas?
First, a word about Medium. It is an aggregator. It selects stories from around the web, and gives them a nice display on Medium's home page, where stories are stacked like blog posts, without any further promotion. Interestingly, it also includes what it calls "collections," where it groups stories on similar topics, such as "better humans," "coffee tales," "climate change," and "dear (blank)," a collection of "letters that probably won't be sent, but should be."
Under "better humans," I found a short post entitled, "Stop Working (so hard)," in which Kyle Bragger writes that he has cut back his work hours and has never been more productive. It's not an original idea, and it doesn't add a lot to help the rest of us resolve the struggles we face trying to balance work, family, and leisure time. It's fine; I'm happy for Bragger–he seems like a nice fellow. But this is not a piece that deserves to be called out as something special.
Maroun Najjar has a post on "Sleep: Everything You Need to Know," which does pretty much what it promises. We learn about REM sleep, the effects of caffeine, napping and more. Nice, but likewise not special. In the "climate change" section, I found a story that asks what we should do about climate change, and answers it by saying that if we're thinking about it, maybe we're doing more than we think.
Under "coffee tales," I found a story I mostly liked called "An Ode to Diner Coffee." Diner coffee, writes Willie Herrmann, can be better than some Ethiopian pour-overs. "I've never had an unhappy cup of diner coffee," he writes. That sums up the piece nicely, but it can't be true. Try a cup of coffee almost anywhere in the South, diner or not, and you get a warm cup of sepia-tinted water that has had only the briefest commerce with coffee grounds. (Except in New Orleans, of course.)
After browsing through Medium, I'm feeling more comfortable disagreeing with the Twitter guys. They know a lot more than I do about a lot of cool things, but their news judgment needs work.
Now, a word about Matter. Once again, I had technical troubles. The site loads very slowly, showing only a blank screen for, say, six or seven seconds. (Maybe that's my MacBook's fault.) And I spent too much time figuring out how to buy a single article. Each article is accompanied by a button that says "$o.99 BUY," but when I clicked them, I kept getting to a page that demanded I subscribe. Eventually I discovered that I could order single stories at the Amazon Kindle store. (You have to click on the article's title, not the "buy" button.)
Once I'd figured that out, I bought Phil McKenna's Uprising, based on the teaser, "Can a self-trained scientist turn energy policy on its head?" It's mainly about a man who contracted with gas companies to check for leaks, and who became concerned that companies were not fixing the leaks. It leads from there to researchers who argue that natural gas might be far worse for the environment than most authorities believe, and that gas companies are losing billions of dollars in gas leaks.
It's a good piece. It could easily have found a home in a good national magazine or on other websites. One problem with the way Matter is set up is that if it's going to publish only one story a month, every single story has to be a home run. This is a good story, but it's not better than the best of its competition. As good, maybe, but not better.
It also contains a questionable assertion about halfway through. In a reference to the lawyer Jan Schlichtmann, who successfully represented residents of Woburn, Mass. in a case against W.R. Grace, McKenna wrote that Grace "had contaminated wells in the nearby town of Woburn, giving children leukemia (emphasis mine). As far as I'm aware, it's still unproven whether the pollution caused the leukemia; cancer clusters are notoriously difficult to explain.
McKenna's story was well worth the 99 cents I paid for it, especially considering that it would have cost me 6 or 7 times that much if I'd had to pick up a magazine on a newsstand to read it. I will, therefore, revise my opinion of Matter upward. It's a good site, and from the comments I've heard on other stories that I haven't read, it does good work. All it needs to do now is to drop the grandiose language ("the home for in-depth journalism about the ideas that are shaping our future"), and, you know, get to work and publish a few more stories than one a month.
Maybe the marriage of Medium and Matter will make enough money for many more manuscripts.
-Paul Raeburn
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