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."

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.

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 :-)

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

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.

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

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.

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)

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

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