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Medium abruptly cancels the membership programs of its 21 remaining subscription publisher partners

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“Could we have a better metaphor for the way Silicon Valley considers local journalism?” fumed the owner of one of these remaining publications.

Medium has informed publishers using its platform to offer paid memberships that it’s ending that feature. An email at the end of last month from Medium’s head of partnerships Basil Enan told publishers that the company was planning to discontinue memberships in May.

“We were among the first to sell memberships on Medium, among the few local organizations working with them,” Chris Faraone, founder of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, told Nieman Lab. “We’ve had an arrangement with them for two years. I’m not saying they don’t have a right to break it. We’ve been scaling back, trying to get people to other platforms anyway. But it’d be nice to have more of a heads up.” (Faraone also works as the news and features editor of alt-weekly DigBoston.) “Our experience in dealing with a lot of these tech-oriented operations is that there’s some good reception, but in the end, it’s whatever their whim is.

“Meanwhile, we’re trying to make a living here. We’re cool with experimenting. But this is been an unbelievable blow. Could we have a better metaphor for the way Silicon Valley considers local journalism?”

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