Tech startups take to Medium to manage image, issue apologies

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

There’s a formula to startup screwups that seems to go like this: make a mistake, wait for public outcry and/or media exposure, then apologize — on Medium.com.

The site’s self-proclaimed mission when it was founded in 2012 was to help people publish “little stories that make your day better and manifestos that change the world.” No longer would regular people with big ideas have to build a blog and a following, or condense their thoughts down to 140-character tweets, to reach a wider audience.

But recently, Medium has also become the de facto wire service for startups, entrepreneurs and tech companies. Particularly those who need to issue a mea culpa or account for their recent missteps or PR disasters.

On Medium, there are dozens of postmortem essays chronicling and explaining a startup’s failure, why a company had to shut down or “what went wrong” in any number of endeavors.

Check it out.