I’m Really Angry About PS I Love You Being Defunded
By: Sarah Cords
Tags: Money, Anger, Writing, Goodbyepsily, Life Lessons

I’m Really Angry About PS I Love You Being Defunded

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

Last week, PS I Love You announced that they had learned from “Medium that they would be pulling their funding for PS I Love You.”

There were a lot of comments on that post, and there’s been a lot of commentary about this on Medium. Most of it has been brave and uplifting and positive and full of advice for how to move on and make the most of our writing lives in other ways from here on out.

Well, you know what? Screw that. I’m pissed, and I want Medium, and all the powers that be, to know it.

First of all, I get it. Medium, like all tech, doesn’t belong to me, and like all tech, I really don’t understand what it’s doing while it’s doing it, or why. I know the nature of all tech and all things via the Internet is to “disrupt.”

But you know what? I’m a member of Gen X and I’m tired. I’m deeply tired. I’m fighting to stay employed so we can keep our health insurance, and I’m trying to look after my elderly mother, and I’m trying to take care of my husband who has health problems, and I’m trying to keep up with my kids who need a lot of help and reassurance after a year of pandemic.

I have had it up to here with disruption, okay?

Sometimes, I need to tell all those stories, none of which are glamorous and none of which are self-help and none of which are about bitcoin or sex or how to make money or the other topics that are the ones enough people want to read about that they actually make money for the writer. Do you know who lets me tell those non-hugely-popular stories? PS I Love You, that’s who.

So forgive me if I won’t be writing an article about how this was a beautiful publication but we just need to move on. We just need to pay attention to our own publications. We have to trust that our tech overlords always know better, and go with the program because they’ve given us an easy blogging platform on which to shout into the void.

Well, not this kid. See earlier: I’M TIRED. Sometimes I want to go to a publication that I know has been edited by editors who know their business. I want to write for a publication that helps me hone my writing skills with actual developmental editing and support. When I’m looking for something good to read, in the spare five minutes I get to do so per day, I do not want to scroll through a million writers’ names and take my chances clicking on all their stories on the off chance I might find something good.

If I just wanted to read a bunch of junk that nobody ever edited and where everybody shouted every controversial thing they could think of, mainly to get views and to get other people to shout ugly things back at them, I would just go to Twitter.

I’m pissed. I’m seriously thinking this is it for me and Medium. No loss for Medium, I know. There are a million people standing behind me ready to put up their own publications and put up their writing without editing. Good for them, and I do wish them luck.

But I think it’s time to take my monthly subscription fee and go buy more books. Books, that are developed over a longer news cycle than the 12-hour one that dominates Twitter and Medium and Facebook and all of tech. Books, that are sometimes still edited and proofread. Books are being written by people who also need to make a living wage.

PS I Love You, and your editors: Thank you. I’ve enjoyed reading you and I’ve enjoyed writing for you. If the people with the money can’t recognize your greatness, well, then, I give up. I have no idea why money goes where it clearly seems to go in our culture, and I’m tired of trying to figure it out.

You deserved better.