I tend to give the benefit of the doubt — whether that be to people or organizations. There are a lot of ways to drop the ball on various things. Goodness knows I’ve found many of those ways in the projects I worked on. I get it. There are ins, outs, what-have-yous.
But what really grinds my gears is when someone purports to be in a position of authority or judgment, and then ends up not doing anything at all to exercise that authority or judgment. I simply can’t abide by it.
Case in point: publications on Medium. I won’t name names, but there is a publication that I have submitted to recently — one where I am a writer for said publication. They have accepted a decent amount of my submissions. There have been a number of articles where I submitted, waited, and they have simply never replied. But guess what, editors: there is a button that says “don’t accept” at the bottom of the article submitted. You can reject an article if you don’t want it in your publication. So if you don’t accept or reject my article, and it’s been days, I can only assume that each of your 15 editors collectively decided to not look at it, and it’s gotten buried in the stack.
Was the problem that one editor liked it, one didn’t, and two were kind of iffy on it? Does it have to wait until next week for your editorial staff meeting — the meeting that the 7 pieces published today didn’t seem to have to go through? Is there a Slack channel where the editors are picking over my work, and thus can’t possibly get back to me with a decision just yet? I am quite sure none of these things happened. In all likelihood, a few editors read it, and just didn’t accept it for whatever reason — probably never communicating with another about it. Hell, it’s just one article, and it’s not even by a Medium heavy-hitter. Who cares, right?
To me, that is why Medium is not currently in the best shape to be a legitimate platform for publications to launch. It’s not clear that editors are held to any standard whatsoever. There appears to be no nudging toward professionalism for editors — which makes sense, because anyone can technically be one. I guess it’s my bad for having expectations of professionalism.
Am I butt-hurt that I received no response for my pieces? Eh, maybe, but if I was, it’s faded by now. I am merely calling for editors who read over a piece and decide not to publish it in the publication to at least reject it. It’d be nice to receive an email or DM via twitter to let the author know why it was rejected, but I won’t make the mistake of asking for the moon when a night-light will do for now.