Matter — A new magazine built on Medium

Today Matter relaunched using a beautiful, custom layout. Medium's been experimenting with new presentations and long-form/paid content over the past year. TBH, it's unclear what Matter is and even its Editor-in-Chief, @marklotto, acknowledges this: "Honestly, what we’re doing is hard to explain: We’re not a news site, but we’ll cover the news, often, and in provocative and playful ways. We’re not another longform publisher, but we’re going to be publishing a lot of longform. We’re not going to be Wikipedia-broad, but we’re not going to be niche either. We’ll jump in big on the stories and issues from across the globe we actually care about, and think you care about too, and we’ll skip the rest. We’re sort of a magazine for a generation who grew up not caring about magazines."

@kam_bain - yup! Medium acquired Matter a little over a year ago.

@ow I guess you could say the same for a personal blog, but people seems to be somehow choosing Medium. Visibility probably?

Didn't this used to be a standalone site? @rrhoover If so, was it an acquisition? I love the concept of building a platform in which to launch a publishing unit internally.

This is pretty cool, but I wonder what the value of running a publication on a site like Medium is over running your own site where you can set your own rules? (Although since Matter is owned by Medium I can see the play here - they want to be *the* content platform)

I wonder if Medium will ever get into book publishing (and e-book), similar to what FG Press is doing. You could do a lot of validation beforehand on the appetite for certain content, you've got an audience you can market to, etc.

@jonnym1ller That's a cool story. Doesn't surprise me. I'd predict more of this will happen. Medium could change publishing beyond just letting "everyone post content" and if I had to guess, I'd say they're looking at how that happens, be it magazines, books, e-books, etc.

@jonnym1ller you can gather a couple of open source tools and make it work in your own website with no so much effort. But building an audience from scratch... not so easy.

@mbavio in its early days I think there was definitely some credibility attached to it. On HN readers would upvote posts just because they were had the Medium URL, but now that its open and 10k stories are being published every week I'd argue that you still have to build your audience from scratch to a large extent – their social recommends only help to amplify the top content. I think that @byosko's point is interesting – for example this post (http://bit.ly/1il0sjk) received 150k+ views on Medium last year and the illustrator was subsequently approached by Random House and has since secured a book deal.

For sure, or perhaps a byliner-esque subscription model... or even given their impressive network of writers they would also be in a strong position to provide community contributed and professional content for brands looking to tell authentic stories that relate to their mission/values and engage with their audiences (aka similar to Contently)... I'll be interested to see how it all pans out!

@jonnym1ller I think we are saying the same thing. I know it's hard to build an audience even on Medium these days, but there is a small chance that you could get a brilliant post lost in time if you just build your blog. That's not gonna happen if you on Medium. And I'm saying this from team "I miss the old times of blogging", unfortunately.

Interesting. Wonder if they will create more specific themed curation either in Matter or have others like it. Could see them creating a Vice style multiple subject matter under one umbrella publisher.

IMO it's a bit too spread out to be useful for me. It's a great concept, but needs some tightening on the execution. Then I'll gladly visit it :-)

@mbavio I'm sure that's a factor but the Medium writing editor is a real pleasure to use.

@ev's words about it: http://bit.ly/1oEwa0v