Twitter founder tackles the future of Web writing

When he stepped aside as chief executive of Twitter in 2010, Williams wanted to get back into blogging and found the tools creaky and insufficient. His is not an uninformed opinion. Before he started Twitter, he developed and sold the blogging software Blogger to Google. His entire career has been built on creating tools that let people make their thoughts public.

“It feels like these blogging tools haven’t really evolved in a decade,” he said. “I did some investing and incubating, but came back around to this as what I wanted to do.”

So he started Medium, a place where stories are made and read. It’s a blogging platform, and anyone can contribute, with writing on all manner of topics. The posts that gain attention, often on Twitter, are displayed prominently and gain more traction as readers and contributors weigh in. The design is responsive, meaning that no matter what you are reading on — phone, tablet or computer — it always looks pretty.

To begin with, he and his colleagues came up with a great typewriter for the web. Sitting behind all the work you see on the Internet are so-called content management systems. It’s plumbing, boring really, but sites like FiveThirtyEight and Vox.com are building something interesting because they have great, innovative tools.

On Medium, what you see is what you get, meaning you can see what you make as you make it. Photos drop in simply and text is easily managed, with lots of white space framing the work.

The writing tool is intuitive enough to seem psychic. Just when you are searching for some kind of function, it pops up out of the background. Medium’s most important feature may be all the stuff it leaves out, including endless options for sizing text or positioning pictures.

Because it is such a pleasure to work with, Medium has become something of a fetish object for writers. In the last year, Medium has published the biographer Walter Isaacson, the author Emily Gould, the journalist Ben Smith, the entrepreneur Elon Musk and many, many others.

Some of them have been paid, but most have not. Medium commissions work from professional writers to make sure a wide range of topics are represented. But more than 95 per cent of the 1,000-1,200 posts a day come from non-professionals. So Medium is as much a place for professional writers and hobbyists, as it is a tool.

“We want to create a system where the best ideas and stories reach their widest audience,” Williams said. “Some of those are going to come from professionals, but it is better as a whole if it has very wide breadth of content. Right now, the Internet rewards speed and quantity, and we wanted to make a place where quality matters.”

In that sense, Medium is a so-called platisher — a term coined by Jonathan Glick of the social network Sulia to describe a new hybrid in which media companies serve as both a platform and a publisher. And lest you think that’s just a geek impulse, Condé Nast Traveler has announced that it would open its website to contributors. Entertainment Weekly is also headed in that direction. Forbes made the switch a few years ago, and there are many other examples.

Medium now tracks as a kind of online magazine, a place for stories that features a mix of long and short, funny and serious, dumb and remarkable. There are collections that are built on book excerpts, writing about war and cartoons, among others.

“We want to be a place that is colonised early by good writing and thinking,” said Evan Hansen, a senior editor at Medium, who previously worked at Wired.

The business part of it is still a long way off. Perhaps because of that, Biz Stone, a founder of Twitter, who also helped start Medium, has switched to Jelly, a next-generation search engine.

Williams has the money to invest in Medium — after Twitter’s public offering, he is reportedly worth more than $2 billion — and although he has taken $25 million in funding from some A-list investors, he is in no rush. Some parts of the site could eventually operate under a subscription model, or brands could pay to publish there, but that will be determined down the road.

Still, at a time when more words are coming from more and more sources, it is difficult and expensive to gain attention. Medium, which doesn’t emphasise writing about celebrities, sports or gossip, will be fighting for mindshare without those clicky attractions.

“It turns out the Internet, like every other technology, doesn’t trend toward good or bad. It’s just a convenience machine for what people want,” Williams said. “Television was going to make us all better people, smarter and better educated, but people ended up sitting back and watching sitcoms. We want to create something that rewards other things that have more lasting value.”