Evan Williams, the billionaire co-founder of Twitter, is trying to rethink online writing at his new start-up, Medium

MARCH 8, 2014, 2:00 PM  Comment

With Medium, Evan Williams Is Tackling the Future of Writing Online

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

Peter DaSilva for The New York TimesEvan Williams, the billionaire co-founder of Twitter, is trying to rethink online writing at his new start-up, Medium.

As a founder of both Blogger and Twitter, Evan Williams helped change the way people write online. Now, with his latest start-up,Medium, he is trying to figure out how we will write in the future.

Mr. Williams is still trying to figure out how else to describe his venture. Medium is for short posts and long ones, by amateur writers and professional ones. It emphasizes a clean design and relies on a network of writers and readers to edit and discover new posts.

Released in 2012 to a select group of users, it now receives 13 million unique visitors a month, Mr. Williams said Thursday at a dinner hosted by Fortune in Menlo Park, Calif. Next week, Medium will introduce an iPhone app for reading posts (but not yet for writing them).

After Mr. Williams left day-to-day operations at Twitter, where he is still a board member, he returned to thinking about writing and journalism. Fifteen years after he co-founded Blogger, which he sold to Google in 2003, it seemed that blogging platforms “considered that job done,” he said.

But there are a lot of things blogs don’t do well, he said, like filtering and promoting posts of interest to readers. And they can be time-consuming, requiring writers to choose backgrounds and formats and update their blogs regularly.

Mostly, it seems, he has been thinking about how to strike a balance between the old way of publishing, where professional editors were gatekeepers, and the new one, where anyone can post anything online.

“The way media is changing isn’t entirely positive when it comes to creating a more informed citizenry,” Mr. Williams wrote on Medium. “Now that we’ve made sharing information virtually effortless, how do we increase depth of understanding, while also creating a level playing field that encourages ideas that come from anywhere?”

Medium is different than blogging and tweeting in certain ways, evidence of how Mr. Williams has tried to grapple with this problem. For example, it pays some professional writers for posts, an effort to seed the site with high-quality pieces. And there are no comments at the end of posts. Instead, readers can leave notes tied to specific words or phrases, and writers choose whether those notes are public or whether to allow notes at all. Mr. Williams says this allows for more constructive feedback and conversations about ideas.

With a mix of algorithmic and human curation, Medium suggests other posts on the platform that people might like to read. Mr. Williams said on Thursday that he aims to eventually offer more personalized suggestions.

“This means your posts link to each other, your ideas bump into each other, and instead of living on an island somewhere out on the web, you’re part of a dynamic whole, where each part makes the others better, he wrote in his introduction of the platform.

Some of Medium’s features recognize that people often read more on their phones than on computers. Posts have an estimate of how many minutes they will take to read, and Medium automatically formats them for small screens.