- On February 16, I received an emailed form letter stating that my contract with b5media (who owns a large blog network that included Medium Dreams) had been terminated. There was no reason given for this, other than a vague “new direction for the company” excuse.
- In the letter, they tell me to email info@b5media.com if I have any questions. At this point, I’m thinking I’ve been fired, so yeah, I have questions. I’m a freelance writer, so if I get fired off of a job, it’s pretty important to find out why. That way, I can either not make the same mistakes again, or learn from the experience in ways that will help my other writing jobs. I email them, and I don’t hear back.
- I contact a b5 blogger with whom I’ve been working, to see if she has any insight into why I had been fired. She emails me back immediately, telling me that the entire entertainment channel (around 50 blogs) has been let go, including her.
- I go to Medium Dreams and find that I’ve been locked out of the site.

- I talk further with a few different (now former) b5 bloggers and find out a little bit more. Everyone has been laid off so that b5 Media could start a general pop culture blog, staffed with all new writers and editors.
- By the end of the day, all 50 of the blogs are gone, and typing in the URLs leads to the new pop culture blog. RSS feeds have posts to the new blog, and Twitter accounts for specialized blogs are being taken over with feeds that have nothing to do with the original sites for which they were made.
- I get pissed. Not so much for myself, as I’ve only been working with them since September, but for the people who have been building an audience and an internet presence for years. Some people even ran several blogs (up to 7 in at least one case). Then, in a blink of an eye, all that hard work: gone.
- I get a Google Alert for Medium Dreams, with an old post from the site. I click on it and discover that all of the Medium Dreams content has been folded into the new pop culture site. I am still listed as the author, making it appear as though I work for the new pop culture site. I do not.

Look, there’s one thing that I’ve learned in my time as a freelance writer: the corporations for which you work are concerned with the big picture– not individual contributors. They’re running a business, and I understand that perspective. It isn’t what they did that bothers me so much; it’s how they did it.

In the blink of an eye, years of peoples’ work disappeared without warning. We weren’t even allowed to say goodbye to our readers, or explain to them what was happening. They simply went to our sites and saw something completely new, unfamiliar, and unlike what they were looking for.

Some readers have gotten a hold of me either here or on Twitter, and have asked if I plan on blogging about Medium somewhere else. The answer is, I don’t know. There are definitely advantages to doing a site like this for a corporation. Namely, the subscriptions to the photo agencies (which is where I got all of the photos for the site that weren’t episode photos), and the professional site design. You guys, I wasn’t a design major in college. I don’t know how to make things look pretty.

I do, however, own www.mediumdreams.net, so there’s a chance I may do something with it. I’m still mulling my options, and I’m just not sure logistically if it’s a good idea or not. What I do want to do, however, is thank everyone who read the site, and especially those of you who commented. You’re the reason doing this was so much fun, and you are all fantastic. Thank you for your support; I really appreciate it.