Media, medium, plural, singular. I like the animals that are their own plural: deer, moose, sheep, bison.
Moving right along, from TechCrunch, June 3:
In April, Medium CEO Ev Williams wrote a memo to his staff about the company’s shifting culture in the wake of a challenging year.
“A healthy culture brings out the best in people,” he wrote. “They feel psychologically safe voicing their ideas and engaging in debate to find the best answer to any question — knowing that their coworkers are assuming good intent and giving them the benefit of the doubt because they give that in return.”
A few paragraphs later, Williams wrote that while counterperspectives and unpopular opinions are “always encouraged” to help make decisions, “repeated interactions that are nonconstructive, cast doubt, assume bad intent, make unsubstantiated accusations, or otherwise do not contribute to a positive environment have a massive negative impact on the team and working environment.”
He added: “These behaviors are not tolerated.”
The internal memo, obtained and verified by TechCrunch, was published nearly one month after Medium staff’s unionization attempt failed to pass, and roughly one week after Williams announced a pivot of the company’s editorial ambitions to focus less on in-house content and more on user-generated work.
Medium’s editorial team got voluntary payouts as part of the shift, with VP of Editorial Siobhan O’Connor and the entire staff of GEN Magazine stepping away.
However, several current and former employees told TechCrunch that they believe Medium’s mass exodus is tied more to Williams’ manifesto, dubbed “the culture memo,” than a pivot in editorial focus. Since the memo was published, many non-editorial staffers — who would presumably not be impacted by a shift in content priorities — have left the company, including product managers, several designers and dozens of engineers.
Those departing allege that Williams is trying to perform yet another reset of company strategy, at the cost of its most diverse talent. One pull of internal data that includes engineers, editorial staff, the product team, and a portion of its HR and finance team, suggests that, of the 241 people who started the year at Medium, some 50% of that pool are now gone. Medium, which has hired employees to fill some vacancies, denied these metrics, stating that it currently has 179 employees.
Medium said that 52% of departures were white, and that one third of the company is non-white and non-Asian. The first engineer that TechCrunch spoke to said that minorities are overrepresented in the departures at the company. They also added that, when they joined Medium, there were three transgender engineers. All have since left.
“A beloved dictator vibe”In February, a number of Medium employees — led by the editorial staff — announced plans to organize into a union. The unionization effort was eventually defeated after falling short by one vote, a shortfall that some employees think was due to Medium executives pressuring staff to vote against the union.
The month after the unionization effort failed, Medium announced an editorial pivot. The company offered new positions or voluntary payouts for editorial staff. A number of employees left, which is not uncommon in the aftermath of a tense time period such as a failed unionization and the offer of a clear, financially safe route out.
In April, Williams posted the culture memo outlining his view on the company’s purpose and operating principles. In the memo, he writes that “there is no growth without risk-taking and no risk-taking without occasional failure” and that “feedback is a gift, and even tough feedback can and should be delivered with empathy and grace.” The CEO also noted the company’s commitment to diversity, and how adapting to “opportunities or threats is a prerequisite for winning.”
Notably, Medium has gone through a number of editorial strategy changes, dipping in and out of subscriptions, in-house content, and now, leaning on user-generated content and paid commissions.
“Team changes, strategy changes and reorganizations are inevitable. Each person’s adaptivity is a core strength of the company,” the memo reads....
....MUCH MORE
Speaking of singular, a heads-up to Ev. As Congresswoman Virginia Foxx (R. NC) recently reminded Liz Cheney:
"A leader with no followers is just a person on a walk”
That idea has an Auguste (ahem) provenance, having probably been thought, in the aloneness of the night, by every politician back to antiquity. My favorite version:
Stealing a page from Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin:
