Medium Offers Buyouts to All Editorial Staffers

The blogging platform Medium announced it is offering voluntary buyouts to all of its roughly 75 journalists and editors, most of whom it hired away over the past few years from publications like Fast Company and Mashable to build bespoke publications around topics like tech and health.

In a post on Medium, CEO Ev Williams said the company planned to focus more on supporting individual writers who use the site to publish—a likely acknowledgment of the rise of Substack, which has increasingly lured big name journalists to its paid newsletter platform. As part of the shift away from producing its own journalism, Williams said that Medium’s vice president of content who led its roster of publications, Siobhan O'Connor, is leaving the company.

“The bet was that we could develop these brands, and they would develop loyal audiences that would grow the overall Medium subscriber base,” Williams, who previously cofounded Twitter, wrote. “What’s happened, though, is the Medium subscriber base has continued to grow, while our publication’s audiences haven’t.”

The change comes about a month after a failed unionization effort by Medium’s editorial department. During a virtual meeting with staffers on Tuesday, company leaders acknowledged that the plan to offer buyouts was formed after the union drive, and that they wanted to give employees who weren’t happy with their roles and the shifting editorial strategy an option to leave, according to two people who heard the remarks and requested anonymity to speak without the company’s permission.

When asked by editorial staffers what they would do at Medium if they didn’t accept the buyout, Williams said one possibility would be shifting to support and edit individual writers, one of the people said. Medium’s head of communications, Sandee Roston, told The Information that staffers who stay “may continue writing for a publication, or some iteration of it.”