On Tuesday, Matter announced the six finalists for a new international reporting fellowship. In an experiment with crowdsourcing the fellowship jury, Matter is letting readers vote for their favorite proposal, deciding who takes home $10,000 for the project. Only readers who are logged into their profile on Medium, the platform that publishes Matter, can vote by using Medium’s recommend option, and the proposal that has been recommended the most by November 21 at 6pm wins the fellowship.
By the end of the workday Tuesday, one of the six proposals had climbed high on Medium’s list of the platform’s 20 most-read stories, Souvid Datta’s “The Price of a Child,” about sex-trafficked children in India. Another top-read story was titled “My Rejected Fellowship Proposal for Matter.”
“That’s the beauty of a site like Medium; If people like what you write, it’ll get noticed,” says Jason Smith, who had received the rejection email for his proposal about big pharma the day before but was frustrated that a request for feedback was declined. That’s probably understandable, since Matter received around 200 proposals and has just five editors on staff. Nonetheless, Smith uploaded the proposal to Medium.
He says the blogging platform (or “platisher,” as it has been dubbed, since Medium is both a platform and publisher) has helped him as a new writer, one without a background in journalism and who only published his first story in a local California newspaper earlier this year. “I don’t have anyone who writes in my life,” says Smith. But through feedback on Medium, he says, he has built a network of other writers that he bounces ideas off of, while his Medium stories have given him online exposure.
That’s exactly what Medium’s mission statement claims it wants to be: a collaborative space where anyone can share ideas and stories. So Smith says he was frustrated that Matter didn’t publish all the proposals as announced in its call for submissions (which a Matter editor calls a confusion that they weren’t aware of), that kept him from receiving crowdsourced feedback.
Smith’s action illustrates some interesting dynamics of this type of open platform, heralded by some as the future of online publishing. There are no editors or gatekeepers preventing users from publishing, making it harder to exercise editorial control over something like fellowship submissions. To Matter, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Managing editor Madison Kahn wrote in an email to CJR, “Clearly, anyone whose proposal was rejected can publish it on Medium! And they should!”
To the question of whether it would be problematic if rejected proposals receive more reader recommendations than the proposals chosen by Matter, Kahn continued, “[I]f it gets a lot of recommends, even better! But that falls outside the constraints we’ve set up for the fellowship.”
In any case, Matter’s experiment with its new fellowship may be redefining the traditional element of curation in fellowships and grants, as Medium and other blogging platforms have done with publishing.
As of Wednesday, Smith’s rejected proposal had fallen off the most-read list but still had more recommendations than some of Matter’s six finalists. His readers advised taking his proposal to Kickstarter.
The rejection hasn’t deterred him, and Smith is considering different platforms for his proposal, so he can keep writing. “I had never had a blog or anything,” Smith says, “I feel like I’ve been dropped in this other world.”
Lene Bech Sillesen is a CJR Delacorte Fellow. Follow her on Twitter at @LeneBechS.