State of the Stallings

Acknowledging the laid off elephant in the room 🐘

Ariel Meadow Stallings

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Ariel, a white woman in her late ’40s, leans her face against a mirror. She and her reflection are both looking into the lens of the camera and smiling. There are flowers in the background.
Me and me at the mirrored barre wall in my living room.

Hey, friends! This is just a quick update because it feels odd not to acknowledge a transition…

WORKY STUFF

  • I’m no longer working at Medium. I was laid off a month ago as part of a re-org of the team I was on, which also meant the departure of my colleague Buster Benson and our engineering manager. After almost 30 years of working in this industry, I know to treat every tech job as a temp job, so you won’t find any butthurt here… I’m just grateful that I was able to get Boost Nomination-In-App launched!
  • Another reason for zero butthurt is that some of you might recall that Medium was actually my second job — I never stopped working for Offbeat Empire, my publishing company. With my time freed up, I’m back to working full-time on the Empire’s publishing projects. These include navigating Offbeat Wed’s SEO and newsletter strategies in a post-Google HCU world, building out an affiliate network for our downloadables, and bizdev calls with content colleagues who’ve been in these small biz trenches with me for decades. (Speaking of partnerships, man do I still miss the Lovesick Expo, but I think that era has passed.)
  • I’m also hopping on calls with colleagues about potential new roles, because it turns out that while I…

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