An interview with Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine: writers with subscribers should be paid more and thinking “Medium was going to shine” in journalism was a mistake
Casey Newton / Nieman Lab : See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Two months into the job, Tony Stubblebine is publicly revising the strategy he inherited. Ev Williams handed him the CEO role in July 2022 amid a critique of a [[a:980742|ten-year tenure that left Medium caught between Substack and well-funded publishers like BuzzFeed and Vice]] — a squeeze that explains both the journalism retreat and the pay reform now on the table.
The admission matters because of what Medium still is: a subscription platform with a paying base reported at 200K-400K subscribers at $50 a year back in 2019, whose revenue flows through a writer-payment model Stubblebine now says undervalues writers who bring their own audiences.
First-order effects
- Medium's writer compensation is set to tilt toward writers with subscribers, changing who earns on the platform right now: audience-carrying writers gain, generalist contributors lose relative standing.
- Stubblebine's framing of the journalism ambition as a mistake signals Medium will stop competing for newsroom-style editorial work, freeing resources for the core subscription product.
Second-order effects
- Substack's pitch — own your list, get paid directly — becomes harder to differentiate against if Medium pays subscriber-driven writers more, forcing the choice between platforms to hinge on terms rather than philosophy.
- Writers deciding where to build will weigh Medium's revised split against Substack's direct model, pressuring the whole paid-newsletter and platform-writing market on payout terms.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, general-purpose publishing platforms converge on a single structure: pay writers proportional to the audience they bring, and abandon editorial ambitions — leaving original journalism to dedicated outlets and the platform wars to audience-ownership economics.
The trend: Consumer publishing platforms are retreating from original journalism and re-centering on paying the writers who bring paying readers, with Medium's post-Williams reset as a clear data point.