It happened on Medium: January 2025 round-up

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From a U.S. news perspective, January 2025 was a year in a month, beginning with the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles and followed by the presidential inauguration in Washington D.C.

Throughout, writers came to Medium to share their stories. Ajounisingh asked, “Your house burned down in a wildfire — now what?” and Loren Kantor shared a moving tribute to David Lynch. I highly recommend checking out our Staff Picks for more great examples.

Reading such great writing makes me want to write more, but I’ve been in a rut as of late. I don’t know about you, but I’m horribly susceptible to blank page syndrome. The specter of a white, empty screen is enough to make me never play with words again. So living in these non-stop unprecedented times, I feel like the firehose of everything just prevents me from picking anything to write about: Water, water, everywhere, and I just can’t figure out how to get myself to drink.

In January, David Todd McCarty published “That’s Not A Story” in Ellemeno. In it, he describes the difference between anecdotes, which we all have, and a “proper story”, which is “a complete essay with a beginning, middle, and end, where the writer overcomes some obstacle, a truth is learned, or some other sort of meaningful shit occurs.” His piece weaves together advice and examples from famous writers and humorists that you know, but also includes examples from McCarty’s personal writing practice, and those parts of the piece were most valuable to me.

For instance, the simple statement that McCarty takes notes as he goes about his life so that “days don’t pass by in a blur.” Of course, we all know that writing more means you have more to write, but using writing as a way to stop time and prevent loss of memory? That hit me hard in a time when the daily news tsunami somehow washes away my ability to capture individual moments in my life.

People like to sneer at the term “expert,” but the truth is that everyone is an expert on their own life — and writing about that is the clearest path to sharing your real and human wisdom with others.

So I’m going to think about which personal anecdotes I can turn into a story, and I hope you do too — there’s no better time than now to do it.

— Amy Widdowson, VP Communications

Medium by the numbers

• 634,000: Number of unpublished drafts created in January (and y’all know how much we think you should publish those drafts!)
• 74,900: Number of new stories in publications
• Nearly 4,000: Number of accounts suspended in January for Partner Program abuse

Platform updates from our team

• If a story was featured by a publication, we added “Featured” labels on story pages and writer stats pages.
• In your notifications, we now show response previews so you can more easily see how readers are reacting to your work.
• We made it easier to report and hide comments you don’t want to see on your post.
• We continued to address spam and comment abuse.

Over at the Medium Newsletter…

Medium Newsletter editor Harris Sockel reports that the most clicked issue was “Use this flowchart to make tough decisions easier” on January 23. Our most commented issue was on January 17, “What the end of Meta’s moderation means.”

Two of January’s most-commented on stories

“I Don’t Know How To Make You Care What ChatGPT Is Quietly Doing” by Linda Carroll in The Generator

“Buy Once, Cry Once: The $2,000 Kitchen Knife Lesson” by Mark Laflamme in At Home

Much-highlighted passages

• “I got fired from that corrupt publication because I refused to let AI replace passionate, competent writers, and I wear that job termination like a badge of honor.” — Maria Cassano , “I’m a Professional Editor and These Phrases Tell Me You Used ChatGPT”
• “Gifts should add joy, not stress — or worse, clutter.” — B.R. Shenoy in “The New Rules of Gifting”
• “I had forgotten the joy of having energy and not being tired.” — pockett dessert in “2024, A Year Being Sick And Tired, Willpower and Spirituality”
• “Spring will come
  Hope rewarded
  Life is good”
  — John O’Neill in “Winter Reflections”

Top stories from new (or new-ish) writers on Medium

• In the vein of “shoot for the moon so you fall amongst the stars… etc.”, this is definitely a moonshot achieved: “A Comprehensive Review of Rolling Stone Magazine’s ‘500 Greatest Albums of All Time’” by Tom Morton-Collings
• I don’t know much about baseball, but I really enjoyed “Cardinals Top 30 Prospects” by Taylor Crews. Crews mentions he used to put his top 30 prospects list on other platforms, so I’m pleased that he’s bringing his obsessive attention to detail to Medium.
• I took a playwriting class or two in college — the practical advice in “The Simple Fix When Your Characters Don’t Grip The Audience” by Leticia De Bortoli in Screenwriting & Storytelling would have been super helpful for those final scripts.

Notable new publications

• Design Systems Collective, “a welcoming community for designers and developers passionate about scalable, consistent design.”
• Looking for “advice, insights, and ideas from the Medium data science community”? Check out Data Science Collective.

Some of the the most-shared stories in January

• “You are an absolute moron for believing in the hype of “AI Agents” by Austin Starks
• “They Know a Collapse Is Coming” by Cliff Berg in Age of Awareness
• “Scientists Tracked 1,000 Kids for 40 Years. This Was the №1 Predictor of Financial Success” by Jessica Stillman
• “The 5 paid subscriptions I actually use in 2025 as a Staff Software Engineer” by Medium’s own Jacob Bennett in Level Up Coding

For more great stories from Medium’s writers and publications, check out our Staff Picks. To learn something new from Medium writers every weekday, subscribe to the Medium Newsletter.