Mitt Romney announced he was not running for president in 2016 on Medium. The White House posted the entirety of President Obama's budget on Medium. And now Medium, a website two Twitter co-founders—Biz Stone and Ev Williams—started in 2012, is coming for the rest of D.C.
What is Medium? The simplest explanation is it's an online publication platform. The backbone of the site, and its main selling point, is its beautiful and simple design. With big, cushy fonts, text fields uncluttered by advertisements, and large-format-photo options, it's a sandbox for anyone (even us) to create Web content that rivals the best designed sites.
Medium's pitch to politicians and political groups will be simple: It's for thoughts that can't fit into a 140-character tweet and are meant to be read more deeply than a Facebook post. Kate Lee, a Medium senior editor (formerly director of content), says the company is looking to expand in D.C., and is currently hiring a staff member to do outreach here. "There are a lot of places out there that are forums for op-eds, but it's not easy necessarily to place one," Lee says. "I think [Medium is] a place where you can choose to publish and make your own news."
The site is genre busting on the social Web: a mashup of the social-sharing aspects of Twitter, with the build-it-yourself ethos of Wordpress, but with a reverence for long-form writing, like The New Yorker. That anyone can publish on Medium makes it more difficult to describe the story types a user might find on a site. Roughly, there are four categories.