Evan William's Medium acquires journalism site Matter

Matter is a Kickstarter-funded long-form journalism site dedicated to science and technology

When Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone first announced that they had created publishing platform Medium, the goals they set out for the site were lofty. The point of the platform was to make the media better for creators, consumers and, yes, the world. How exactly it was going to accomplish this, though, was another matter.

Now Medium has made its first acquisition, purchasing long-form journalism project Matter, it was announced in a blogpost from Matter on Wednesday. It's a move that could be a sign of where Medium eventually wants to go.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Founded six months ago by reporters Jim Giles and Bobbie Johnson, Matter publishes long form journalism articles about science and technology and sells them on subscription for $0.99 per month. The company raised $140,000 in a Kickstarter campaign, almost three times the amount it has originally targeted, with 2,500 backers, one of whom was Ev Williams. 

"After we launched, Ev told us about his new company, Medium. He and his team want Medium to be the best place on the internet to read and create high-quality content, and they suggested that we become part of that project," Matter wrote.

It didn’t take us long to realise how much sense that made for Matter. We’re delighted to say that the move is complete: Matter is now part of Medium."

Matter says that will remain a standalone company and that is has "no immediate plans to alter the team, the places we publish, or how much we charge for each article."

"More importantly, we have no plans — at any time — to stop crafting hard-hitting narratives about big ideas. We do, however, want to expand what we do, and Medium is a big part of that (see, for example, Amputees & Wannabes, the recent series of commentaries around our launch story, Do No Harm)."

Some changes will be coming to the site, though, that will "make the site better for readers," and allow the site to evolve. 

"Experimenting with tweaks to the model and the way we distribute our content will be a vital way of making Matter robust in the long term. Joining Medium means we can get the help we need to run those experiments," the company said.

Medium, which was first announced in August, organizes posts into collections with a theme and a template, such as This Happened To Me, which is a collection of crazy stories, or When I Was a Kid, which features pictures of users as children.

Other collections that users are invited to explore include: Been There. Loved That., a collection of photographs from places around the world; Look What I Made, pictures of different things made by users, from shoes to bacon; The Writer’s Room, which features tips on how to be a better writer; and The Obvious Collection, which showcases projects that The Obvious Corporation, which owns Medium, is currently backing.

(Image source: https://www.readmatter.com)