Former Wired.com editor-in-chief Evan Hansen has joined the Obvious Corporation to work on editorial content, providing interesting insight into the direction of Evan Williams and Biz Stone’s company.
Williams and Stone re-launched Obvious Corp. in June 2012 after they both left Twitter, the company they co-founded with Jack Dorsey. Expectations for both Obvious Corp. and Medium, a collaborative publishing tool and the first product it launched in August, have been high, although the product appears to be growing slowly.
Hansen wrote in his email to friends and family (reported by Mike Isaac of AllThingsD, formerly of Wired) that he would be working specifically on editorial content at Medium, which hired noted literary agent Kate Lee to direct content back in November.
At the moment, Medium is publishing blog posts from a wide variety of writers, technologists, and artists, clearly focusing on quality over quantity and slowly rolling out the ability to contribute. Published stories are divided into “collections” around certain themes, and aims to re-think how writers to publish to the web.
Last year at our Roadmap conference, Williams told attendees “I’d rather be HBO than whoever creates ‘Desperate Housewives,’” perhaps hinting at the type of content strategy that Medium intends to pursue.
This post and its headline were corrected at 4:28pm to after Hansen clarified on Twitter that he wasn’t leading all of editorial at Medium, just science and technology.
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