Ironically, I feel like this could be a useful article to people if you stuck to the premise, i.e. how to write articles that reflect the personal, subjective style that has become the norm, and didn’t foreground your own sense of aggrieved entitlement.
I’m old school. I come from a journalism background and I was taught to take yourself out of the story in most cases. It makes writing stronger and I stick to this philosophy 90 percent of the time.
Guess what? I almost always get curated still because I put a lot of time into researching and writing my stories, I write about interesting topics that aren’t well covered, and I edit and format my articles well.
I’d like to see more “objective” political reportage and commentary because that’s what I like to read and write, but that kind of stuff is rarely done well on Medium.
When people do political stuff on here, they’re usually rehashing the same takes you see everywhere else in the media but badly done—ex. I scrolled past about a dozen articles with the same basic stance that the detention centers are indeed concentration camps—or aggregating a bunch of news from other sources.
Even though they’re not my cup of tea, the personal stories on Medium account for most of the good content here simply because they’re something you won’t see anywhere else. My favorite article I read on here was a guy talking about his piss fetish. I was kind of grossed out but it was intriguing and it was something I would only find on Medium.
Not everyone can casually do reporting, which is very labor intensive, but amateur writers can still tell a good story about something that happened to them that resonates with other people.
So I’m not surprised that Medium leans into promoting personal stories. It probably has something to do with the fact that its users actually like them. Imagine that. A company recognizing what its customers like and then giving it to them.
All writers have to conform to the style and voice of their publication, so yeah, try to write an article with a personal angle to appeal to Medium’s user base. I’ve done that with some success. I largely still keep it objective, but as a compromise, I use a personal story as a jumping off point for a discussion about a larger societal issue.
For example I wrote a story about when I was assaulted on the street last month and used as a chance to discuss police violence against the mentally ill.
I kicked off another piece on trends in journalism with an anecdote about my journalism class in college, but then I returned to an objective point of view.
Lastly, if the new normal as you say is “feminist dominated,” then why are you alienating potential women readers with your seething bitterness toward women over what you perceive as some kind of reverse sexism?
Think about how you could be doing better instead of externalizing your failures onto others or the site. May I suggest not writing some variation of the same bad article over and over?
