On Medium

Last week I wrote Texas Politics about the legislative-gamesmanship theatrics around Wendy Davis’ filibuster. It did OK on the blog, nothing special. Evan Hansen of Medium reached out asking if I wanted to republish there. I couldn’t think of a good reason to do that, but then I also couldn’t think of a good reason not to. So here’s a blogger’s-eye view of being a Medium author.

• The Medium version is Don’t Mess With Them and it’s better than my version, because I did a couple more editing passes and tightened things up. Also, the presentation over there is terrific; minimal and very readable.

• The Medium authoring environment is excellent, gets right out of the way. Everything I wanted to do was easy, with zero learning curve.

• The piece was written on the 26th. I have some tens of thousands of feed subscribers; it’s hard to measure, since I like the wide-open freedom of constructing and serving my own feed. Some of them probably read the piece but, since it’s a full-content feed, there’s no need for them to visit the blog. In addition, something over 1250 people came from somewhere external and read the piece.

• The Medium version has had 455 reads.

• There’s too much stuff on Medium. My piece got more or less exactly zero notice until it got promoted to the Editor’s Picks stream. I wonder why Medium would want to publish something if it weren’t an editor’s pick? There are millions of places on the Net to do self-publishing.

Will I publish on Medium again? Honestly, I’m not sure. I’m 100% happy with my own little space on the Web right here; but everyone should try new things sometimes.

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