How publications enhance the Medium experience
Medium publications are spaces where multiple people are able to contribute to sharing content, usually about a singular topic. Publications are pretty great. Here is what I think of both the user experience and the creator experience.
Publication follower
As a follower of multiple publications, they tend to be a great place to find great content about certain topics. Most of them are well organized, though unfortunately some publications don’t clearly display what their guidelines are for contributing to the publication, though others display theirs clearly. Overall, the user experience for publications is great.
Publication owner
As the creator of a publication, I’ve enjoyed the amount of customization they offer, as editors can change the look, layout and feel of a publication pretty easily.
One great feature is the feature pages, which are pages for specialized content. These pages can be linked to in the tabs on the publication’s homepage. For story layout, there’s the option of four layouts for how stories appear on the publication.
With the ability to make sections on a page, a publication can choose featured articles to display, or can have articles appear in each section based on what’s trending, the latest articles or use sections for different tags.
The screenshot above shows the different customization options for a publication’s homepage. The top section is featured stories, which are just stories that the publication editors can pick to display in that section. Below that are trending stories which are automatically chosen to be displayed by Medium.
Each section also allows the editor to choose how many stories to display; I have chosen to only display one article in the “About” section, and three trending stories below it. There are four options for layout, and I have chosen the grid layout.
The settings also allow publication editors to choose how the article card appears on the homepage, in the grid layout the story cards can have the story info display either below or on top of the image. The toggle option for title is for whether the section title will appear, in my case, “About” or “Trending.”
With the tabs is also the setting to have one link to a non-Medium webpage. The outside link for The Entertainment Hub is currently its Quora space.
Here is the live version of the publication homepage:
It’s also interesting that writers can submit an unpublished draft to a publication, which the editors can edit directly. Though this is a great feature to allow editors to adjust articles, I think that Medium maybe should implement an approval system so the original author is notified when their story is edit and so they can accept or dismiss the edits.
The only feature I’ve thought of that I would like to see publications implement is the ability for people who aren’t contributors to submit, with the option for editors to toggle submission option for non-contributors. As it is, setting up submissions are a bit more of a hassle as a publication has to add a person as writer or editor.
This may work great if someone is a good fit for that publication, but some people may not typically produce the type of content which fits a publication so they may be added as a writer just to submit one article, and some publications don’t like it when writers are inactive.
By not allowing single-article submissions by people who haven’t been added to a publication, the process of submitting articles is made more difficult as someone who wishes to submit is forced to directly contact the editors so the editors are able to review that person to see if they are a good fit to be added as a writer.
If someone were able to submit a single article, then editors could just review that one article and then choose to publish or reject it. This way allows for followers who aren’t interested in regularly contributing to submit their one article for review and not have to go through email or messaging because they just want to get one article published.
Then, writers who wish to become writers or editors for a publication can still contact the publication managers for that process.
Overall, Medium publications are a great tool for writers to get their articles more views and they are a great way to curate similar content. Publications are also great for followers to find content they’re interested in.
Originally published on Quora. View the rest of my posts on my profile.
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