In Case You Missed It: June 2016
Some of the best stuff on Medium, month by month
Premiere sports
It was a month of firsts for sports on Medium: Bill Simmons’s website, The Ringer, launched. The NBA published finals previews, and European soccer club AS Roma shared stories about its players (in multiple languages!).
Derrick Rose made headlines with his first statement about being traded to the Knicks, exclusively on Medium.
Also in basketball, venture capitalist and entrepreneur Paul Kedrosky wondered why the positive effect of immigration on the sport has not been explored more deeply in relation to the U.S.’s broader economy.
Earlier in the month, the death of Muhammad Ali inspired an outpouring of tributes and memories, including those by Keith Olbermann, Baratunde Thurston, Thaddeus Howze, Ross Levinsohn (rosslevinsohn), and many others.
Politics and prose
Vice President Biden and new Medium user John McCain set a tone of mutual respect with an exchange of posts about civility in politics. (John McCain quickly took to the platform and also responded to a piece in the military culture publication War Is Boring with his thoughts about a recent senate vote to conceal the price of the Air Force’s new B-21 stealth bomber.)
Other first-time political figures on the platform included Elizabeth Warren (who wrote two fiery pieces about Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court), Dr. Jill Biden, American Enterprise Institute founder Arthur Brooks, and the Office of the DNI (Director of National Intelligence).
The White House brought the United State of Women Summit to its Medium publication, kicking off with pieces by Barack Obama and The First Lady and including others by Kristen Bell, who defends being “girly”; Christy Turlington, on improving access to maternal healthcare; Melinda Gates, on the gender gap in impoverished countries; and Reshma Saujani, on girls in STEM. After the summit, Veep producer Stephanie Laing launched her PYPO publication with a piece reflecting on the experience.
Also appearing in The White House’s publication this month: chef José Andrés on the politics of food and the importance of clean cookstoves in the developing world. (Related: Food52 also launched Short Order, a Medium-native publication.)
Last but certainly not least, Hillary Clinton made her case for why Donald Trump should not be president of the United States.
Read on for more coverage of political voices on Medium.
Tech tales
It’s never a dull moment in startup world. Pinterest engineer and women-in-tech advocate Tracy Chou announced her departure from the company, while Fab founder Jason Goldberg told the tale of the company’s “epic failure.” Debut author Antonio García Martínez told his own epic tale, as well, of his journey from startups to Facebook — and the birth of ad networks along the way — via an annotated index and excerpt from his new book.
You never know who’s reading your story. Case in point: Web animation and UI expert Rachel Nabors shared the distressing saga of her immigration detention in the UK, which caused her to miss a speech she was traveling to deliver, and Woz himself—Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak — responded with a note on his own similar experiences.
Meanwhile, women in tech pubs got active: Lean In launched their publication with a first post highlighting African-American women, and WeFestival augmented their live event with great stories.
The future of news
Amid the hubbub over Facebook and political bias, BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith and Nabiha Syed published a manifesto for a First Amendment for platforms. Google News’s Richard Gingras put forth his vision for a successful future for news, and the Google News Lab set up shop on Medium, with a dedicated publication.
Investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald took to Medium for the first time to tell the moving story of a dying dog’s miraculous recovery, and to try to find him the perfect forever home.
In radio, The Brian Lehrer Show has been exploring major issues in this election season, starting with foreign policy, racism, and U.S.-China relations, and New York Public Radio CEO Laura Walker wrote her first piece on the creative disruption in the medium.
Medium continues to be a place where people make or break their own news (as Tracy Chou showed, as well). June announcements in the media world included CNBC’s Carl Quintanilla on his new TV show and former Chief Digital Officer of the Met Sree Sreenivasan on his next steps.
Cultural storytelling
Networks bolstered their presences on Medium. In advance of its annual awards ceremony, BET joined the platform, with a first post about (who else) Beyoncé. HBO PR broke news of the return of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Anil Dash remembered P.M. Dawn’s Attrell Cordes (aka Prince Be) with an extensive look at the band’s oeuvre — to which kevin kiernan, a member of the artist’s management team, responded.
Storytellers got creative with their methods. Fargo creator and novelist Noah Hawley wrote about how he tells stories “differently”—by playing with structure — on the occasion of his new novel. ESPN The Magazine editor-in-chief Chad Millman chose a visual storyboard to retell the story of the country’s first terrorist attack, 100 years ago this July.
The world turned upside down
Two big events that dominated world headlines — Orlando and Brexit — also did so on Medium, as people turned to the platform to vent, argue, tell personal stories, or make sense of what happened. Three collections round up the wide diversity of posts on Orlando. In addition, Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi made statements, and noted writer and activist Jenny Boylan shared her thoughts in her first Medium post.
There was a wealth of pieces about Brexit leading up to and after the vote. Read the best of them in these collections.
Medium teamed up with 70 Bay Area news organizations and local activist groups to focus on one signal issue: the plight of homeless people in the region. The San Francisco Homeless Project pop-up publication is a shared space for those groups to publish together. In addition, you can read stories by those who are most affected: individuals who live, or have lived on, the streets.
