The role writing plays in our lives is changing dramatically at this moment. The advent of AI tools has fundamentally shifted how we all understand the act of writing, and how we interpret the writing we consume.

A lot of pundits say reading and writing are dead.

As a reading and writing company, that perspective is unacceptable to us. It also flies in the face of what we’re seeing on our own platform. For instance: The number of active, non-spam writers publishing on Medium is up 35% year-to-date from 2025.

So we set out to understand what’s really going on with writing, right now. We started by asking writers what they think of writing, partnering with the team at the Harris Poll to ask 1,175 writers across the internet about their writing, how they write, how often they write, why they write. Drawing from that survey and our internal data and industry sources, the 2026 State of Writing Reports aims to dispel myths and hype around what’s changing, and share data from actual writers about where things really stand with writing.

The strongest theme is that writers still love writing, and they’re optimistic about the future. Most writers say they like or love the process of writing, and they’re more likely to say that their skills are improving and that they feel positive about writing overall. And while most have recently used AI for writing, they remain skeptical of AI-assisted writing whether they produced it themselves or are encountering it as readers, reinforcing that AI may be gaining ground as a tool, but isn’t at risk of replacing the author.

Let’s dig in.

(Click here to download a PDF version of the Medium State of Writing Report 2026)

Most writers use AI…

Most writers (71%) have used AI in some way as a part of their writing practice in the last three months — in fact, it’s the only writing tool we asked about that saw increased reported use over the past 12 months, (24% now using AI writing assistants vs. 19% saying they used it 12 months ago), a bigger relative increase in use than tools like word processing platforms, newsletter tools, and note-taking apps. And of those who use AI in their writing, nearly all (88%) say that AI has had an impact on their writing process in myriad ways, both positive and negative, from improving drafts (41%) to increasing pressure to produce more (19%).

AI usage fell into a variety of familiar buckets: editing for grammar, clarity, or tone (33%), followed by getting topic ideas (26%), getting feedback or critiques (20%), and generating first drafts (19%). When asked what the perceived benefits of AI are, writers who use it report improved draft quality (41%), making writers more likely to experiment (30%), reducing time to produce work (28%), and improving confidence about publishing (27%).

…but they don’t trust it

Yet on the whole, writers don’t trust writing produced using AI, whether they produced it themselves (60% distrust) or someone else did (69% distrust).

1 in 3 writers believe most of what they read is written by AI

Three-quarters of writers suspect at least some of what they read was written by AI, and a third believe most or a lot of it is. That’s a remarkable level of ambient suspicion baked into everyday reading — it means writers are now reading everything through an “is this even human” filter, which is a meaningful shift in how content gets consumed and trusted.

Nearly 1 in 4 writers say AI has changed their voice

AI is having an impact at the creative level for writers: 24% say AI has changed their style or voice, 19% say it has increased pressure to produce more, and 14% say it has reduced confidence in their own ideas or voice.

These concerns sit alongside other AI concerns reflected in other surveys out there. In their September 2025 survey of writing professionals, Gotham Ghostwriters and Josh Bernoff found that 91% of professional writers were worried about hallucinations, and 78% worry that AI is making writing bland and boring.

As search traffic recedes, AI isn’t filling the gap

From Medium’s own data, we’ve seen a 35% decline in our traffic from search over the last year, in line with what we’ve seen broadly across the industry. Meanwhile, referral traffic to Medium writers’ stories is growing but still extremely modest, and an early surge of growth from OpenAI’s ChatGPT has since disappeared. Referrals from these three sources in August was still less than half of one percent of Google search traffic.

Worth noting: This internal data only shows referrals from Google Gemini, not data from Google’s other AI tools like AI overviews or AI search, since we can’t (yet) track those separately.

Writing is overwhelmingly a private act — only 1 in 4 people share publicly

Among writers we surveyed, writing remains far more personal than public: Only a quarter of the general public share written content publicly at least monthly with only 18% of all writers saying they are publishing more often than 12 months ago (see footnote 1). This isn’t to say that writers aren’t sharing their work; one third of respondents said they write to share with their friends.

Meanwhile, a little over half of the general public (54%) write for themselves — meaning the default mode of writing today is still solitary, not performative (see footnote 1). Even more telling, going public doesn’t mean giving up the private practice: of that 25% who do share publicly, three-quarters (76%) also write for themselves. In other words, even writers who focus on sharing publicly are still writing for their own eyes only, which we see reflected in our own data (Medium data shows that writers wrote 4.4 million unpublished drafts in the last year alone, and we’ve got our new writing app TK, which allows for private and small group writing).

Earning money isn’t the focus — even for writers who publish in public

Only 12% write to earn money, dwarfed by self-expression (56%) and self-care (41%). More surprising: Even among the subset of writers (43%) who publish publicly and are more visibility-driven, only 29% are actually paid for their writing. Writers who share their writing publicly are primarily looking for readers and reach, not revenue.

And some write for the follow-on impact that writing has in their career: 16% write to build influence or reach an audience, 12% write for career advancement or professional visibility.

Despite all the AI disruption, writers feel more optimistic than anxious about the craft

If everyone’s telling us that reading and writing are dead due to AI, these findings surprised us the most–because it isn’t what writers are feeling. Half of writers say their own skills have improved in the past year (only 8% say worse), and writers are far more likely to feel positive about writing in general than negative (42% vs. 8%). AI is clearly injecting anxiety at the margins — 19% feel more pressure to produce, 14% feel less confident in their own voice — but the overall mood is optimistic.

Writers ♥️ reading…

At Medium, we know that one of the fundamental paths to writing well is reading well, and the writers we surveyed agreed: 45% said that they read to improve their writing skills. 57% of writers surveyed say they are spending the same time reading as they did a year ago, while 32% say they actually spend more time reading. Only 11% of the writers surveyed reported they were reading less.

…and writers still ♥️ writing

Despite the doomsayers proclaiming that writing is dead, 75% of our respondents said that they like or love writing — though we must admit we’re very curious about the 5% who said they dislike or hate it.

This enthusiasm for the craft followed throughout the responses, indicating that writers use writing as a way to think, to connect with one another, to understand the world around them. They use it to sharpen their professional skills, reach new people, and build their own confidence: in the Harris Poll, 42% write to clarify their thinking or process ideas, and 41% write for self-care or mental health.

When asked what their top goals were for the next 12 months, 38% of writers want to complete a major personal work. Meanwhile, only 22% want to grow their audiences substantially, and only 19% want to earn a meaningful income from writing.

On our end, we know that writers still love writing — whether they’re reaching millions of readers or keeping a private daily writing practice. This is the quiet revival: while the world changes fast, the love and value of writing isn’t going anywhere.

Methodology

The Harris Poll survey was conducted online within the United States by The Harris Poll on behalf of Medium from August 12–17, 2026, among 1,175 writers among who 1,099 write for themselves and 504 have published or publicly shared their writing at least once a month. Data are weighted where necessary by age by gender, region, race/ethnicity, household income, education, marital status, size of household, and political party to bring them in line with their actual proportions in the population.

Respondents for this survey were selected from among those who have agreed to participate in our surveys. The sampling precision of Harris online polls is measured by using a Bayesian credible interval. For this study, the full sample data is accurate to within + 4.0 percentage points using a 95% confidence level. This credible interval will be wider among subsets of the surveyed population of interest.

All sample surveys and polls, whether or not they use probability sampling, are subject to other multiple sources of error which are most often not possible to quantify or estimate, including, but not limited to coverage error, error associated with nonresponse, error associated with question wording and response options, and post-survey weighting and adjustments.

Footnote 1: As measured from an online study conducted by The Harris Poll from August 6–8, 2026 among a representative sample of 2,008 U.S. adults ages 18 or older.

Medium’s State of Writing Report 2026: A private writing revival was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Sometimes writing can be hard. You fall down research rabbit holes. The blank page stares back. And publishing your innermost thoughts to the worldwide internet can feel… exposing, to say the least.

TK is our answer to life’s writing obstacles, big and small. Our distraction-free social writing app lets you keep your writing private, or share it with those you trust. It’s not about streaks, or word counts, or amassing followers. It’s just about writing for the love of writing.

As we get closer to opening up TK to everyone, we’ve gotten some questions about who it’s for, how it works, and how to get access. And who better to show you than the writers actually using it?

Our TK ambassadors share how and why they use TK.

Here’s how our ambassadors use TK

When we asked why they use TK, several ambassadors said the same thing: staying in one place.

“I can write with zero nudges from red squigglies and grammar suggestions. I can proofread it quickly in app. … From a note in the woods to a final draft, I can stay on one app. That’s real nice.” — Andrew J. DiMeo, Sr., PhD

“I never have to open another tab to go to Google or check another website to get a definition or information. I have everything I need from the note and I have an assistant I can talk to any time.” — Kainos

Others mentioned how TK gives you a home for your messy thinking, half-baked thoughts, or personal journal.

“TK is a dedicated space for the messy middle of thinking. In a landscape where technology can generate quick answers on demand, TK encourages us to slow down, sit with half-formed ideas, and discover what we actually think through the process of writing.” — Brit Taylor

“I can voice dictate entire drafts now, and edit them afterwards with voice commands. Then, I’ll export the story to Medium and hit ‘publish.’” — Lindy Vogel

Ultimately, every writer uses TK differently. Lindy Vogel organizes story drafts and collaborates with writers from her publication Sweary Mommy. Derek Reinhard mines his Medium stories for new ideas. Writers use TK to build book outlines, organize their work notes, or maintain a daily journal practice.

But most of all, TK is a quiet writing community that encourages you to keep going.

“TK lets me stay in flow while writing, and then smacks me around like a cagey editor after the fact. But, then there is also the private little cozy corner of the internet community in TK, who let me be human with other humans around our writing. And if push came to shove, I'd be willing to sacrifice my AI buddy to keep the cozy humans.” — Thomas Knoll

“TK is a community of interesting people, mostly Medium writers. I've used the app for three months now. As a result, my writing process has become more enjoyable, more interactive. The words are coming easier. And when I don't feel like writing, I read other writers' public TK posts instead of doomscrolling on social media.” — Elaine Medline

“TK feels a little like being handed the keys while the house is still being built. You get to explore, experiment, occasionally wonder what a button does, and somehow become part of shaping the place while you’re using it.” — Annette Couchenour

We’re opening up TK to users for free, on an invite-only basis for now — if you’re interested, check out our TK ambassadors on Medium to find their invite links.

More about our TK ambassador program

TK Ambassadors is a small invite-only community of writers who use TK often. We believe writing is easier when you’re not doing it alone. And that’s the reason we started our Ambassador program, so new users can learn from real writers about what works. Their feedback has helped us shape the app for writers like you.

Each month, the Ambassadors share how they’re using TK, what they’re learning, and how the app can improve. Follow them to keep up with their experience.

Thank you to our Ambassadors Lindy Vogel, Derek Reinhard, Andrew J. DiMeo, Sr., PhD, Kainos, Thomas Knoll, Elaine Medline, René F. Najera, MPH, DrPH, Brit Taylor, Cheney Meaghan, Annette Couchenour, Vincent Halles, and Do Capozucca for helping new writers join us on TK.

FAQ about TK

How do I get TK?

TK is still invite-only, or for Friends of Medium. The easiest way in is an invite from a current user. Ask any of the Ambassadors above, or a friend who’s already writing on TK.

Does TK write for me?

No. TK’s AI is more like a writing coach than anything else. It’s there to prompt you to write, help you get unstuck, ask questions, and develop an idea, not generate your writing for you.

Can I use TK on mobile?

Yes, TK has iOS and Android apps, so you can pick up a note wherever you left off.

Can I bring in writing I’ve already done elsewhere?

Yes. Import from Medium, Apple Notes, Bear, Markdown files, or Obsidian using the Import button under your profile picture.

Who can see what I write on TK?

By default, just you. Share a note or open a Library to a small, trusted circle only when you’re ready. TK isn’t a public platform.

Can I publish a TK note to Medium?

Yes, if you want. Once a draft feels ready, send it to Medium and publish from there. Several of the ambassadors above do exactly that; others prefer to keep all their TK notes private.

How 12 writers are using TK to write more (and what they've learned) was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This year’s Medium Day, coming this Friday, September 18th, promises to be the biggest one yet. There are over 100 sessions happening over the course of the day, so if you haven’t signed up yet, join the 12,000+ people who already have and register for free now.

The best part? Because they are virtual, there are no tracks to sign up or lock into — you can choose your own adventure. Here’s a small sample of what you might want to see!

You can’t get to the bottom of being curious. There’s always more to be interested in, and being interested feels good on its own, no delivery truck of more required. It’s the kind of reward your brain will keep choosing, because it doesn’t leave you hungrier than it found you.

— Jud Brewer MD PhD, Why Did You Stop Doing the Thing You Loved?

For the craft

If you’re new to Medium (and by extension, this newsletter), welcome! Medium Day is a great resource for getting started.

There are plenty of sessions that will teach you how the site works. Kassandra @ Medium, Medium community manager, will be holding a Medium 101 seminar to help you find your sea legs and troubleshoot common questions about the platform. Terrie Schweitzer, Director of Content Curation at Medium, will be giving insight into how the curation process actually works. Greg Gueldner from the Medium Trust and Safety Team will host a session on how the Medium moderation process works — send your questions today. And you’ll get a preview from Product Designer Zulie @ Medium of TK, Medium’s new writing tool.

Alternatively, if you’re getting stuck with writer’s block, Zulie will also be hosting The 100-Minute Story, a series of five 20-minute sessions where she brings a story to life from finding an idea to publication. Writer Niklas Göke will make the case for why everyone should write a daily blog. For more advanced writers, Cara J. Stevens will help you fast-track your novel in 90 days. Dan Foster can help you find readers who stick around.

Love happens in small movements; imperceptibly growing, like a squash vine in summer. You don’t realize it’s happening, and then you take a step back and see: Wow. This thing is big. We made this without realizing we were making it, and now it is keeping us alive.

— Sophie Lucido Johnson, The Text I Wish More People Would Send

For every Medium community

One of the great things about Medium is just how diverse of a community of experts write here. We have communities of science writers, poets, designers, musicians and music lovers, fiction writers, AI enthusiasts, and everything in between. During Medium Day, you’ll get to hear directly from them for free.

For example, sports writers can check out Mike Butler’s session on how to write home run sports stories. Food writer Gargi Kumari will show you how to read a country’s history from a single plate of food. You can learn how to avoid common scientific mistakes with Gideon M-K; Health Nerd. Filmmaker Julio Vincent Gambuto will teach you how to write cinematically, and the AI curious will learn how to go from idea to Flutter mock-up with programmer Danielle H.

It’s not just experts in specific fields; at Medium Day, you’ll also learn from folks who can help you make your life a little better. There are a dozen sessions aimed at self improvement and psychology, including ones from neuropsychotherapist Julie N. Hook, PhD, surgeon Mark Shrime, MD, PhD, and researcher Stephanie Anderson. For the career minded, founder Ro Fernandezwill channel her experience into the art of holding a productive meeting.

And for those who want to get a chance to form real community and chat live with their contemporaries and colleagues, there are 60-minute long meetups for poets (with Willow Schroeder, Dalila Brooks, NoWords.Space LLC, and Kathleen Dutton), editors (with Nicole Akers and Anangsha Alammyan), queer and trans perspectives (with Sarah Scorze), dealing with imposter syndrome (with Robin Wilding 💎 and Soul Dancer, Soul University), and more.

Medium Day is when every corner of Medium truly shines. We cannot wait to see what you learn.

A final thought

There is nothing in the world that feels like doing something creative. In Namasate Now, writer Jason McBridewrites about the wonder of the act of creating something, building off a quote from John Darnielle of the band the Mountain Goats: “I’m totally in the full heat of this one.”

McBride (and we) agree that this fully describes how it feels to be consumed by the creative process:

Is there any better feeling in the world than to be in the full heat of something? To be so lost in the writing, drawing, or cooking of whatever, that you completely disregard best practices, and you follow the muse wherever she leads.

It’s how I imagine the Sufi whirling dervishes feel. Spinning, balanced on the bleeding edge of control. Incandescent. Effulgent. Transcendent.

This is my purpose in life: to find the moments where I can be totally in the full heat of creation. Getting lost in the act of creation is when I find myself.

Get lost in the act of creation this week.

Make sure to register for free for Medium Day so you can take advantage of every session.

Deepen your understanding every week with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by brandon echter, Scott Lamb, and Carly Rose Gillis.

Like what you see in this newsletter but not already a Medium member? Read without limits or ads, fund great writers, and join a community that believes in human storytelling.

How to make the most of Medium Day 2026 was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Medium writers, you can now try out a new custom footer option that lives at the bottom of your stories. Set it up once, and it appears on all your stories. It’s a great way to:

• Point to your latest blog post
• Direct readers to your blog, book, or newsletter
• Promote your other social platforms
• And more — we can’t wait to see the creative ways you use it!

We know there are writers on Medium who just want to share stories without worrying too much about anything else, but we also know there are writers who want to take advantage of Medium’s built-in audience and simple publishing tools to build their business more seriously. Writers have been adding footers, cramming links in their bios (at least 50k+ of you use Medium to direct readers to your newsletter!), and promoting courses, books, newsletters, websites, and more on Medium for a long time.

We plan to charge for the custom footer feature, but want to make it available for all writers to get a chance to hear your feedback. As we look for new ways to support all kinds of writers, we’re exploring tools like this one that would be part of a future set of paid features for writers. Try it out and let us know what you think.

How exactly does Medium’s custom footer work?

Using the custom footer, you can:

• Choose between “contrast” or “subtle” themes to make your footer card stand out or blend in.
• Customize your bio text, beyond what your standard bio has.
• Add up to four buttons directing readers wherever you want.
• Update your social links. We currently support Bluesky, LinkedIn, Substack, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Threads, and X.

Anytime you update it in your settings, it will automatically be updated on all your stories. The custom footer is visible to any and all readers.

You can turn on and update your custom footer by going to Settings > Publishing > Manage Story Footer, or use this link. Please note: You can only set it up on Medium web right now, not on the app.

Supporting pro writers more

We love that Medium is the simplest, easiest place to get started writing and reach readers. But it’s also true that writing is one of the most compelling professional pitches you can give, and that writers use Medium in more serious, professional ways, too.

We see and hear every day how writers use Medium as a portfolio to support their career goals, businesses, side gigs, and more. Many Medium employees were hired off the strength of our writing! We want to build more tools to help support writers who want to go beyond casual posting and use Medium as a real avenue for professional growth.

As always, let us know if you have any questions in the responses. We can’t wait to hear what you think.

FAQ

What is the custom footer?

A customizable block that appears at the bottom of every story you publish. Set it up once, and it applies to every story you’ve published on Medium. When you update it in your settings, it will automatically update on every story.

How do I turn it on?

Go to Settings > Publishing > Manage Story Footer, or use this link. Setup is web-only for now.

What can I put in it?

We expect writers to add custom bio text, promote their course, newsletter, product, meetup, book, consultations, and more. You can also add up to eight social links: Bluesky, LinkedIn, Substack, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Threads, and X.

Who sees it?

Any reader who lands on your story.

Is it free?

Yes, for now, but we will charge for it in the future. As we experiment with features that will be part of a future set of paid features for writers, we wanted to make this one available to all writers to get your feedback and hear what you think. When we begin to charge for it, we’ll let you know beforehand.

Why is Medium building this?

Writers have used Medium to support real careers and businesses for a long time. The custom footer is the first tool built for that kind of writer, with more coming.

Where do I send feedback?
Leave a response on this story, or send us a note of feedback through the support desk here.

Try out custom footers on your Medium stories was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There are many, many people who want to write but don’t. I was one of them. When I started testing TK, our social writing app, in earnest, I hadn’t published anything non-work related on Medium in months.

I am normally prolific, but I was busy discovering the challenges of parenthood for the first time, which completely took over my brain. Suddenly, almost every writing idea I had was about my new life with my daughter.

I realized pretty quickly that I didn’t want to share those stories widely. In my former life as a blogger, I wrote to be read as widely as possible. Today as a parent, I write to think, to process, and to hear someone say, “Oh yeah, my child did that wacky thing too and they turned out OK.”

There was also more fear of judgement. I’m not currently capable of developing anything like as polished as the parenting essays I love to read on Medium, and the internet can be a cruel place to share anything less than perfect. I do often have a scrappy half-list of anecdotes I hope might be funny and relatable to like five other parents I know won’t judge me for typos.

I still want to be online, just not necessarily on the world wide web. I want to be on small internet. Cozy internet. Trusted internet, like the gatekept circles Maggie Appleton describes in her essay on The Dark Forest and the Cozy Web. Places you can have a conversation without worrying it might be screenshot and posted to “Shit Parents Say” on X.

For me, TK became the cozy internet spot that helped me pick up the proverbial pen once more.

TK’s origin came from wanting to solve a very specific problem for easily distracted writers: Instead of opening a new tab or checking your phone when you need to do a bit of side research, you can summon TK’s assistant to do it for you. (I have done so while drafting this essay in TK: @TK, grab the link from Maggie Appleton’s cozy web essay; @TK, what’s the biggest gap in my Medium publishing history?) Instead of leaving your writing, you can stay in flow while TK digs around for you.

As Derek Reinhard wrote: "This has saved my concentration innumerable times already... TK allows me to start a search for whatever I was thinking of without having to stop my writing."

That was not a big selling point for me, personally. When we first started developing TK, I will freely admit I was hesitant. I’m a long-time Medium fan (as I’ve written before), and TK felt like an AI-powered Medium with a slightly spiffier editor. Maybe it would be useful for some people, but I didn’t yet see the value for writers like me.

But over the past year of using it, it solved for me what it’s solved for so many other writers: it helps me write more, more often.

It started with a sleeker editor and the inline assistant, but over time, TK’s capabilities grew organically as we listened to writers about what stops them from turning thoughts into notes, and notes into drafts. We want to make TK the default place for all writing. What was in the way? And what could help those people actually write?

One big reason is a question of audience, and how making the audience smaller and more personal can actually, paradoxically, help you write more. I loved how Elaine Medline put it in her piece “Write Loose, Then Hit Publish:” "I found a mansion on Medium, and now a friendly tavern on TK."

Other writers also feel that the pressure to produce perfectly can prevent publishing. Deanna Bugalski 💋 had a memorable way of putting it: "Publishing is not the same as writing... Writing is often much messier. It is where you admit what you actually think before remembering that other people have Wi-Fi. TK seems designed for that middle space."

For others, it is the AI-driven organization capacities. Sam Vaseghi, for example, writes about his sophisticated AI-powered TK-to-Medium writing process: “[W]ith the help of TK’s integrated AI and my own workflow, I developed a pipeline by which I could move an entire article, including equations, into Markdown and HTML in a few steps.”

Others benefit from the daily writing streak counter, the custom writing prompt, the Claude MCP integration, or just having a personal scratch pad for research and note-taking that helps develop random ideas into stories.

We’re also listening to and learning from people who don’t consider themselves writers, but who might want to be. Remember: TK isn’t going to be just the default place for writers, but writing.

Our core belief as a company is that writing makes the world a better place. Writing is good for you, and it’s good for the people who read you. We developed TK entirely around that simple idea, and with the understanding that the obstacles stopping someone from writing today are very different to what they were fourteen years ago when Medium launched.

Whatever the obstacle, today, TK gives over 1,000 people the motivation and tools to catch that thought and write it down.

It’s been close to a year since we announced we’d broken ground on TK. What’s next?

We’re going to continue slowly expanding the circle of people we invite to TK. We’ll continue building tools, both on TK but also on Medium, that help everyone write more, regardless of whether or not you consider yourself a writer.

As for me, I will continue enjoying the online company of the small group of fellow parents who read my notes, writing things that don’t have a home on Medium but that I still feel better for having written, using TK’s AI to organize my random half-drafts and to-dos, and taking part in the community we’re building here.

Read the original version of this essay, showing AI attribution in blue, on TK. (One of my favorite features is the AI attribution — I used TK’s inline assistant to help me find the links, and I want that to be clear when readers see it!)

What we learned from the first 1,000 beta users in TK was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The recent behind-the-scenes breakdown of the new Calendly brand by design firm Smith & Diction is a fascinating look at the different design choices they made over the course of the redesign. In between the discussion of shape, font, and color choices, there was an interesting aside:

We’re at a very interesting crossroads at the moment with genAI stuff. Clients want us to use it all the time. Most of our peers either fully hate it or fully embrace it. We still find ourselves smack dab in the middle as AI-curious.

It’s an interesting question — if anyone can generate a website or new brand in an instant, where do designers come in? In this issue, we take a look at how the profession is changing in the age of AI.

I’m not talking about generative AI taking photographer’s or designers jobs or anything like that. It’s the “AI everywhere no matter what” that’s making it harder and harder to get traffic to your website or portfolio. It’s also making content on tips and techniques obsolete.

— Thomas Fitzgerald in Designtography, AI is killing the Internet for Photographers and Designers

How AI is changing taste

The Smith & Diction aside reveals just how much the (much-argued) rise of AI-powered design tools has changed the design profession in a very short period of time. If you have access to AI tools, all you need to do, in theory, is send a few sentences over to an agent and you will get back something that looks passable. This rapid closing of the skill gap is pushing design trends in interesting new ways, writes Michal Malewicz.

Rather than the streamlined designs that have become the hallmark of AI-generated design — or as Malewicz calls it, “repeatable, generic, flat-design slopware” — he sees major brands rushing in the other direction. “I feel like we’re moving into a rather specific direction with UIs,” he writes. “To avoid easily repeatable, generic, flat-design slopware, there’s only one path to take.”

That path is zigging into textures, realism, and creativity when AI-driven design is zagging into flat design. Skeumorphism is a design philosophy that renders digital objects in the style of real-world ones (think of the wood textures, knobs, and other “real-world” nods that were a hallmark of the first phone apps). It fell out of favor in the early 2010s, but Malewicz sees a revival on the horizon. Glass, metal, and even ice textures are everywhere. A recent Spotify update temporarily replaced the app’s green circle logo with a disco ball. There’s even a rise in hand-sketched design that resembles a notebook.

He calls these trends “Skeumorphism 2.0.” It’s a movement that’s both in response to, and only possible with, AI:

Quick prototyping and curiosity driven experiments are one of the most ideal use-cases for that technology. Nothing stops you from building something unique. It’s literally just a couple hundred prompts away, with lots of failed experiments along the path.

Design mature companies, on the other hand, look for designers who can solve problems in creative ways.

— Matej Latin in UX Collective, 90% of designers are unhirable?

How AI is changing the job

Tastes aren’t the only thing warped by AI; the roles and expectations themselves have evolved. Maya Brennan was brought on to lead design on an agent analytics platform at Amplitude. When she started, “I had never shipped a PR in my life,” she writes in UX Collective. “Today, I pretty much own our team’s frontend.”

Becoming an “AI designer” means leaving a lot of the typical tools of the trade behind and acting more like a coder. Amplitude is a quick-moving start up with new features being released every day, but following a more traditional design process would have slowed that all down. “There was just no way I could keep up with all the changes if I tried designing pixel-perfect, up-to-date prototypes,” Brennan writes. Instead, she used AI tools to vibecode interactive prototypes and eventually got access to the codebase itself.

Cassie McDaniel, Vice President of Design at Medium, agrees (and you can hear more about her thoughts on this at an exclusive Friends of Medium session at 11am ET on Medium Day). Every designer at Medium is also working with code. “Some designers code more than others — there is always a variety of strengths designers can choose to deepen — but working closer to the material designs are built with changes how we use and think about that material,” she writes. “It’s more realistic. And it’s more efficient, a lot of times, to go in and make changes ourselves.”

This change of expectations is well-paired with how AI is changing what software designers can actually control. Designer Aurélie Radom writes that while designers are used to building an experience around a blank canvas that they entirely control, AI upgrades mean that the canvas itself is working, too:

The canvas gives the agent an environment to work from, but the agent is also navigating that environment. It can find relevant context, connect information across tools, decide what to act on and carry the result forward. Context is no longer just something the system receives, but something the system can seek.

And that means attention becomes part of the design problem.

Where exactly, Radom asks, does the human designer need to come in? A human does not want to be brought in for every decision (“That would leave me doing much of the work myself”), but that same human also does not want the AI agent to make every decision without them (“Those are decisions where context and personal preference matter”). Radom believes this handoff between an agent and a human is the biggest challenge for designers today.

“Design systems can become part of the instructions and constraints that shape how a machine operates, rather than remaining only a reference for human designers,” she writes. “This also changes what taste means.”

These massive changes — to what design is, who design is for, and how it’s changing the very definition of taste itself — is exciting for the professionals in the system; they are the ones who get to figure out the answers. As Michal Malewicz describes, the core rules of design and what designers do are meant to bend. “It’s for us to make stuff and test, then adjust.”

A final thought

American icon Gloria Steinem, a writer, activist, and feminist movement leader, passed away on September 2, 2026. In a remembrance in ZORA, writer Maia Niguel Hoskin, Ph.D. reminds readers that while it’s easy to take the rights Steinem fought to secure for granted, her work is not history and the fight is not done:

A mature feminism ought to be capable of gratitude without amnesia. We can thank a woman for the doors she helped open and ask who still cannot get through them.

We can celebrate the distance traveled without pretending everyone began at the same starting line, and we can inherit a legacy without inheriting all its limitations. That is not disrespect. That is how movements grow up and evolve.

Make sure to register for Medium Day, coming up on September 18, 2026.

You can also check out publications like UX Collective or the Design topic.

Deepen your understanding every week with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by brandon echter, Scott Lamb, and Carly Rose Gillis.

Like what you see in this newsletter but not already a Medium member? Read without limits or ads, fund great writers, and join a community that believes in human storytelling.

How AI is changing design was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When writer Joe Guay - Dispatches From the Guay Life! was recently watching The Sound of Music, he turned to his partner and said, “You know, the day Julie Andrews or Dolly Parton leave this earth, there is going to be a collective sob. People won’t be prepared for the feeling or the emotion. Their uniqueness has made them reach across all spectrums of humanity. It’s going to be ugly and very sad.”

When Parton died on August 25, 2026, that collective sob came.

In this issue, we’re taking a look at grief — both the worldwide outpouring of love when a public figure dies, and the quiet ways we can support those coping with recent loss.

She made us like who we are as Americans, when times have been so dark.

— Debra Groves Harman in Culture Club, Dolly Parton was The Best of Us

Remembering the public and the private

Something interesting happens when beloved figures like Parton, or actor Tim Curry, or other public figures pass away. In life, they take on a larger-than-life scope; they become symbols than people. And in death, people mourn those symbols. Dolly Parton, for Guay, was “held up as the epitome of genuineness.” It was less about Parton’s talent than her immense goodness — summed up with the mantra “What Would Dolly Do?” For Syl Lockhart, Tim Curry’s performance as Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show was the first key to unlock burgeoning queerness.

But it’s important to remember that these public figures were people all the same. Loren Kantor spent a summer working on Dolly Parton’s 1980s variety show, and his interactions with the country legends were much more down to Earth — long workdays, workplace drama, and fights with management. Rand Bishop met Tim Curry during the Los Angeles run of The Rocky Horror Show (the musical the famous movie was based on) when he and friends were invited over for dinner, where Curry “went out of his way to make it quite clear that, in spite of what Rocky Horror fans might assume, he was not gay.”

For those on the inside, the gap between the symbol and the person can be confusing. Kantor’s coworker on Dolly, Tom was a bonafide Dolly fanboy — when they first met, “Tom fell to the floor and rocked back and forth in a fetal position,” Kantor writes — but it took a moment alone with Dolly (and a moment of bodily function) for him to realize that his idol was “just a regular old person like you and me.”

And despite Curry’s insistence on keeping his private life separate from his public persona, Bishop finds that insistence beside the point:

Tim Curry’s gloriously camp, defiant androgyny in The Rocky Horror Picture Show has given countless individuals permission to liberate themselves from normative constrictions and expectations and be who they are.

Of course, life continues, and people move on. Most conversations still hold safely to planning and doing, and I’ve long since learned the world won’t stop for grief. But the cost of that silence is more than I could write. Perhaps that’s just the cost of being too busy to notice.

— Thomas Allan in The Memoirist, I’ve Long Since Learned the World Won’t Stop for Grief

The ocean of grief

“It has been nine months now, and I am tired of constantly feeling this way,” writes Apeksha Apte in Pen with Paper. “I know I will grieve my father till my last breath, but I do not want every sadness or melancholy to lead me back to him.”

When we miss someone, that grief is all encompassing. Apte still feels her father’s absence in her everyday sadnesses — watching a sad movie, walking home alone. “A part of me is terrified that if I stop thinking about him, even for a few minutes, I will begin to forget him,” she writes.

This fog of remembrance is well documented, as Sadhvi Pharasi writes. Joan Didion documented it in The Year of Magical Thinking. C.S. Lewis found himself hating making the slightest effort at anything after the death of his wife. “Denise Riley, writing after her son died, described the sensation of living outside of time altogether, in a stopped present with no forward motion,” Phavarsi writes, “and she noted how quickly other people want you back inside the calendar with them.”

Trained mediator Malynnda Stewart, PhD, BCPA thinks of grief as an ocean that comes in waves — “we get knocked down, come up for air, find our footing, and look for shore.” Well-meaning people are often pointing grieving people to the shoreline, Stewart writes, when really what they need is something to help them out in the water:

Sometimes that looks like floaties, the small, immediate things that keep someone from going under today. A phone call on the anniversary nobody else remembers. Saying the name of the person who died instead of tiptoeing around it. Showing up without waiting to be asked, because asking takes energy that’s already gone.

And sometimes it’s bigger than that. Sometimes it’s boat-building, the slower, more collaborative work of helping someone construct a way to live in the water long term, not just survive the next wave.

So, as you help those around you swimming in that ocean of grief, where even a small moment can remind one of loss, help them build the boat and live with their loss.

She died. Our world fractured. It wasn’t so much that we became suddenly, brutally, a family of three. It was more like we unbecame a family of four.

Jacqueline Dooley in Grief Book Club, We Had to Relearn How to Be a Family After My Daughter Died

A final thought

Mia Silverio, Scott Galloway’s research lead, recently gave a behind-the-scenes look at how she produces compelling pieces. Galloway’s company, Prof G Media, has produced countless TED talks, podcasts, YouTube videos, and presentations from around the world, but many of the storytelling tips are the same. Even topics that don’t seem tailor-made for the internet like accounting can go viral with the right story, Silverio writes.

If you’re looking for ways to share your passion, we suggest you check out all the tips, but this one in particular felt apt:

Good stories teach us something new. Good storytellers cultivate the ability to see what others don’t.

I call this “zooming out.” Most people analyze events as if they’re looking through a camera lens, seeing only what’s in focus. Skilled storytellers pull back to capture the wider landscape, revealing potential causes and effects that were invisible in the close-up shot. Put differently, zooming out requires moving from the what happened layer of understanding to the so what? what made it possible? what happens next? Layers.

For more stories on coping with loss, explore the grief topic or the archive of Grief Book Club. You can also read stories about the milestones of Catharsis Chronicles, Crow’s Feet, or The Narrative Arc.

Deepen your understanding every week with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by brandon echter, Scott Lamb, and Carly Rose Gillis.

Like what you see in this newsletter but not already a Medium member? Read without limits or ads, fund great writers, and join a community that believes in human storytelling.

Loss, grief, Dolly, and Tim was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When we launched our Editor Partner Program in July 2026, we knew there was a good chance there would be changes pretty early on, as we learned from the publications taking part in the program and heard from readers, writers, and editors about their experience.

That’s why in September, we are making two changes to the criteria for the Editor Partner Program:

• Removing the Healthy Distribution requirement
• Reducing the monthly story limit from 300 to 100

Starting in September, we’ll be onboarding publications that were previously disqualified in past months only for missing Healthy Distribution requirements. The 100-story limit will only apply going forward, starting in September 2026.

For example, if you published 101 stories in August, that won’t disqualify you for the month of August. If you did not meet the Healthy Distribution requirement in August 2026, that will not prevent you from qualifying for that month, either.

Why these changes?

Our goal with the Editor Partner Program is to encourage and reward the editors who bring value to Medium and the communities they build. When we launched the program in July, we wanted to hear from editors what worked, what didn’t, what could be improved. We also wanted to hear from readers about what publications they value and want to read more of, and find ways to reward those editors.

Editors told us the Healthy Distribution requirement was confusing and didn’t give them information that they could use to improve their publication. Again, we want the Editor Partner Program to reward and incentivize you, not be a source of frustration. So we decided to scrap this requirement.

We heard from readers — and corroborated with our own internal data — that publishing more than three stories a day from a publication was just overwhelming; readers stop reading that publication’s stories, or worse–unfollow it, mute it, and sometimes cancel their Medium membership.

What’s next?

We want to make the Editor Partner Program the best fit for as many publications as possible. Publications help make Medium work, bringing value to readers, writers, and the editors who build and work on publications. We’ve been investing in improving how publications work overall, for all editors, and we want to ensure that the Editor Partner Program serves the editors who are our partners in making Medium grow and succeed.

Thank you, again, for all you do to edit your publication. And thank you for the feedback you’ve already provided to help improve publications and our Editor Partner Program on Medium.

If you have any questions or feedback about the Editor Partner Program, please raise a ticket through our support desk here — we read and triage every ticket we get to make sure the right teams take the feedback into account! It’s part of how we came to these changes. And, as always, feel free to leave a response to this story.

We’re updating the Editor Partner Program qualifications in September 2026 was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Publication editors, you can now choose to use a visual calendar that you set up and see your upcoming story schedule.

When you schedule stories, they’ll show up on your calendar with the time they’re going live. You can also drag and drop those stories to another day.

Feel free to switch between List and Calendar view to see your scheduled stories. We hope this helps it a little easier to manage stories in your publication.

What else is new?

While we were working on the content calendar, we took the opportunity to improve a few other things:

Editors can now see the daily and lifetime publish history of a writer. A few months back, as part of our spam and slop mitigation work, we set a two-story limit on writers, so they could publish just two stories in 24 hours. Editors had no quick way to see if the writer was at the limit or not, resulting in the frustrating experience of trying to schedule or publish a story only to run up against this limit. And then editors would have to choose to either reject the story, or leave it in the queue and try to remember to come back to it later.

Now, you’ll be able to see at a glance exactly how many stories that writer has published today, and in their time on Medium.

When a publication only has one editor, that one editor is now auto-assigned to stories. This came up frequently in our Editor Partner Program for publications with just one editor. Editors have to claim the story so Medium can correctly attribute the work (and earnings) to them, but editors let us know it was frustrating to remember to add themselves if they were the only ones at the publication. Now, if you’re a single-editor publication, you’re auto-assigned.

Investing in our publication ecosystem

Publications on Medium are unique on the internet, as far as I know, in part because the people who run publications are unique. Editors range from casual hobbyists just in it for the love of the topic, to those taking it far more seriously — collaborating with a whole suit of co-editors, creating connected social media accounts, developing a publishing pipeline.

We’ve been able to support the casual editors since publications began, but we’re excited to be releasing more tools that help the more serious publications, too.

We want to support every kind of editor on Medium. More than that: We want to support every kind of person who wants to come to Medium and build a community around something they love, be it cats, AI, food, UX design, or something totally new.

For that to happen, we need to build the tools that make Medium a worthwhile place to publish. That means that publications, editors, and the writers who submit to publications are a priority.

What’s next

Instead of sharing a roadmap, it’s easier for me to say where we want to go, and ask you to help us fill in the gaps for how we could get there. All the improvements that we’ve released are the direct result of editors, writers, and readers advocating for what would make a better publication ecosystem.

Editors told us it was hard to manage multi-editor workflows, so we built the ability to assign yourself to stories in the submission queue.

We heard it was difficult to get writers to read submission guidelines (and hard for writers to understand them), so we developed a way for editors to set optional requirements up front before writers can submit — and optionally share a reason why editors are declining a story if it didn’t make the cut.

Like any open platform, Medium has its share of off-topic and even spammy stories, and editors told us they were seeing a lot of them in their inboxes. We made it easier to find the stories most worth working on with off-topic and no-topic badges for stories in the queue — and gave editors tools to manage and prevent spam and low-quality submissions with the bulk-decline and bulk-block options.

And of course, we’re investing in our publication ecosystem with the Editor Partner Program, which lets us pay qualifying publications for their work to build and grow Medium.

What’s next? We want to make Medium the default place to share your writing on the internet. A big part of that is publications. How can we make publications easier for writers to discover, easier for editors to create and manage, easier for readers to understand and explore?

That’s what we’ve been working on, and it’s what we’ll continue to work on. We’ve loved receiving all your thoughts, feedback, questions, and hope you’ll continue to share. Leave a response on this blog, or raise a ticket here with anything you want to share.

FAQs

What is Medium’s content calendar for publication editors?

A visual view of your publication’s schedule. Every scheduled story shows up on the calendar at its go-live date and time, so editors can see what’s coming without digging through the submission queue.

How do I schedule stories in my Medium publication?

Schedule a story as usual, then find it on the calendar, in List view, or in Table view. Drag a story to a new day if your schedule shifts.

How do editors claim a story in the submissions queue?

Editors assign themselves to a story to take ownership of editing it. Claiming matters for attribution and earnings — for publications that qualify for the Editor Partner Program, editors earn a share of what the story makes without reducing the writer’s payout.

If you’re the only editor at your publication, you’re now auto-assigned to stories, so attribution is handled without an extra step.

Editors, welcome to your new content calendar was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.