Editorially

» see editorially.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

i missed Editorially the same way most engineers missed it. It was a writing tool for people whose day was words on a page, and my day in 2013 was code review and hardware bring-up in ankara. Editorially came out of a small team of web-standards designers who had run Typekit and A Book Apart, and the whole design was about longform writers collaborating on drafts in markdown without the office-suite feeling of Google Docs.

The founding team was Mandy Brown, Jason Santa Maria, David Yee and a handful of collaborators. Private beta ran through early 2013. Public launch was September 2013. The product itself was clean: markdown source view on one side, rendered preview on the other, threaded revision history on every paragraph, comment threads that lived in the margin instead of the document body. Version control that a non-programmer could actually see and read. It was the writing tool people who care about writing tools had been asking for.

The reviews on launch were the kind that get a startup killed by hype. Writers who tried it wrote love letters about it. Shawn Blanc used it for The Sweet Setup. A List Apart contributors adopted it. The trouble was that the loudest users were also the smallest market: web-standards designers who liked well-crafted software will not, on their own, fund a company.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

Editorially's specific pitch was collaboration for people who write for a living. Google Docs was ubiquitous by 2013 but its comments felt like an office suite grafted onto a browser. Editorially treated the document like a code repository: revisions were diffs with threads that attached to individual lines, and the source was plain markdown you could copy out to any static-site generator. The audience that loved this was tiny and could not be scaled.

~ the funny part ~

Two years after Editorially closed, the same collaborative markdown pattern showed up inside StackEdit, HackMD, iA Writer, Dropbox Paper, Notion, and eventually the Vox internal editor that the founding team ended up building. The features Editorially had were the features every writing tool wanted. The market for a dedicated version of them just did not exist.

~ what replaced it ~

The shutdown notice went up on 12 February 2014 with a hard end date of 30 May 2014. Users were told to export their documents by then. Vox Media announced the acqui-hire in June 2014: Mandy Brown and the founding team joined Vox as part of the product organization to work on the Chorus platform. Some of the ideas made it in. The product itself did not come back.

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