Editor Newsletter: The Editor Partner Program is now open to all qualifying publications

Plus new editor tools, call for prompts, and Medium publication best practices

Image by Jason Combs // the Medium Brand team

Hi editors,

Happy July! Here’s what’s going on this month:

• The Editor Partner Program opened to all qualifying publications July 1
• How are you using new inbox management tools like the off-topic badge (now with ten topics) to help you triage submissions faster?
• Adjust the focal point to images
• Medium publication best practices
• Call for August 2026 writing prompts (and let me know if you want your July prompt added to the list!)

(No need for a Table of Contents for this story — if you’re reading this on the web, try mousing over to the right to see our new native Table of Contents feature!)

The Editor Partner Program is now open to all qualifying publications

The Editor Partner Program is now open to all qualifying publications. Today, that’s over 100 publications and over 300 editors. We hope next month will bring even more.

The Editor Partner Program is the first of its kind anywhere online. It’s where you can spin up a publication on any topic you like, and if you do a good job with your community’s readers and writers, you can earn.

We’re investing in editors because we believe in the value you already provide — building community, curating and polishing stories, recruiting readers and writers — and in the value publications will continue to provide in the coming years and decades.

Editors of qualifying publications have already received an email. You can also just check your dashboard by navigating to Manage publication > Editor Partner Program to see if your publication qualifies. If you do, feel free to press “enroll” at any time to start earning when you assign yourself to stories!

When you assign yourself to a story in the submissions queue of a qualifying publication, you earn 25% of what that story earns. Writers keep all their original earnings; we increased the total payout pool to make the editor share possible.

Read all about the qualification details, our vision behind the program, and what it means for the future of publications on Medium here. Read much more about the Editor Partner Program in our Help Center here.

Editor Partner Program FAQs

What exactly are the criteria to join the Editor Partner Program?

Read our blog post for all the details. Here’s the short version:

General criteria (these must always be true):

• Your publication must have open submissions
• The owner must be enrolled in the Medium Partner Program

Monthly criteria (publications must meet these criteria for three of the past six months to qualify):

• The publication’s paywalled stories must have earned $200
• The publication must have published at least one and no more than 300 stories
• The publication must publish stories from non-editor writers
• Maintain overall story distribution levels. (Publications that consistently publish stories that fall into General Distribution or Boost levels will meet this criteria easily, while publications that consistently publish stories that qualify for Network Distribution (think: AI slop, NSFW stories, Medium meta) might want to tighten their acceptance criteria for inclusion. You can read much more information about our distribution levels here.)
• Editors must be operating in good faith. For example, if a publication qualifies, but we see one editor controlling multiple Medium to unfairly earn from the program, that publication wouldn’t qualify.

How do I know if my publication qualifies?

You’ll get an email if you do, and you’ll see the button on your Editor Partner Program dashboard. If you didn’t qualify this month, you can work towards qualifying in future months. We expect new publications will qualify and onboard every month.

What if I’m the only editor at my publication?

You’ll need to manually assign yourself to each story in the submissions queue.

How do I become a publication editor?

If you don’t own a publication yet, the simplest path is to start one. You can also reach out to existing publication owners and offer to join their team.

New submission inbox tools — and how you’re using them

If a writer submits a story with topics that don’t match the ten topics you’ve set for your publication, or submits with no topics at all, you’ll now see a small yellow badge next to that story in your inbox. It’s a quick visual signal to help you triage which stories are more likely to be a strong fit.

You can read more about it here.

After receiving feedback from editors, we’ve increased the number of topics you can set for your publication to ten topics. Add them in your publication settings.

We’ve also recently released editor assignment tools as well as the bulk block and decline. Have these tools changed how you manage your inbox? I’d love to hear what’s working and what isn’t.

Reply to this story to let me know.

The feedback we’ve received from editors has already been so helpful, and I’d love to get more.

Adjust the focal point to images (and two other small improvements)

Editors, you can now more easily adjust the focal point on any images submitted to your publication. On the pre-publish page, select “Adjust image” to decide what part of the image shows up there.

GIF featuring my handsome cat Gazpacho

It’s an improvement on an existing (although very hidden and underused) feature. I know many editors are very careful about how images show up on their publication’s homepage and elsewhere around Medium, so I hope this helps make those stories look even better.

We added two other small quality of life improvements — the option for writers to organize publications alphabetically in the submissions page, and a way to hide all highlights when you’re reading stories. Check out the full writeup here.

Medium publication best practices and guidelines

Any Medium member can create a publication and run it however they choose. That freedom can sometimes cause confusion, though. Over the years, we’ve gotten questions about how much of a story editors can change, best ways of adding writers, who owns the content in publications, how much self-promotion is OK, and more.

We’ve recently published some best practices and guidelines that we hope will clear up any questions about how to best run a publication on Medium.

Call for August writing prompts

If your publication is sharing writing prompts for August, tag me in the story (Zulie @ Medium) or reply to this story and I’ll add them to next month’s Writer Newsletter.

If you shared a July prompt that didn’t make the July 2026 writing prompt list, let me know and I’ll add it!

That’s it for July. As always, reply with questions, feedback, or anything you’d like to see in a future newsletter.

Happy editing,

Zulie @ Medium