It’s a big day for Twitter – but it’s also a big day for one of its co-founders and former CEO Ev Williams. Today, he and his team announced that Matter, part of Medium, will be spinning off into its own venture.
Just as Twitter is not a social network, Matter Studios’ editor-in-chief Mark Lotto has emphasized:
It’s not a website. It’s not a website. Matter won’t even be a publication, not anymore, or a publisher, not precisely. We’ve been describing it as sort of a studio and sort of an incubator.
Matter, which was initially funded on Kickstarter back in 2012, has until now focused on producing investigative, longform writing, but it’s been slightly quiet of late.
Matter Studios is set to offer financing for multi-platform digital journalism, including podcasts, books, live events, and streaming of film, TV and video.
It’s billing itself as both an “incubator” and an HBO for digital storytelling, promising to help with sustainable funding, intellectual property protection and distribution for the best journalism around.
That will no doubt be rocket-launched thanks to its backing from Ev Williams, as well as a board of advisors that counts an ex-president of MTV and a veteran New York Times journalist among its ranks.
“We’re going to make stuff and we’re going to get stuff made,” explains Lotto. “That’s the idea, though we have no real idea where it’s going to lead. Matter’s always been this mad scientist’s laboratory of creativity, a slightly bonkers and forever-evolving experiment. This is just the beginning.”
Watch this space.
➤ Meet Matter Studios [Kevin Lotto]
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