Matter to join Medium, the collaborative light-blogging platform

Long-form digital publishing project Matter has been bought by Medium, the new publishing platform launched last year by Ev Williams, co-founder of Twitter, Blogger and Odeo.

Matter founders Bobbie Johnson, a journalist formerly with The Guardian and GigaOm, and Jim Giles, formerly of Nature and New Scientist, will continue to edit Matter, and will join Kate Lee and Evan Hansen on Medium’s editorial team.

Matter was launched with a Kickstarter campaign that began in February 2012, aiming to raise $50,000 to establish a long-form journalism project focusing on the science and tech of the future. The public responded with $140,000 in funding.

In a statement published on Matter and Medium, Johnson and Giles said Williams had initiated talks earlier this year but that there would be no dramatic changes in the short term, though stories would be cross-published between the sites.

“Our service is an ongoing experiment, but we have no immediate plans to alter the team, the places we publish (our website and the Kindle store), 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. One of the things that made it easy to join Medium was the knowledge that the company believes in great storytelling as much as we do, and is prepared to support what we do.” Read full article
(via guardian.co.uk)