About a year and a half ago, the founders of Medium did something that was both totally old-school and daringly novel: They set up a dedicated cartoon site, The Nib, hired editorial cartoonist Matt Bors to run it, and gave him a budget to pay the contributors. At a time when even venerable institutions like The Atlantic expect writers to pitch in their articles for free, this was a welcome sight -- a publication with enough respect for its contributors to offer them paying work.

It showed, too; some of the most remarkable comics of the past year and a half have appeared on The Nib, including work by Leela Corman, Mike Dawson, Eleanor Davis, Shannon Wheeler and Sarah Glidden. Those are just the creators who appear on the front page today.

And now, just like that, it's gone, to be replaced by ... well, it's not clear. Bors posted an announcement Friday that things would be different going forward:

This will be the last week of The Nib’s regular lineup. We will no longer be running certain work on certain days or with the same regularity. It’s a departure from what we’ve been doing, for sure, but I came here to experiment with publishing. You’ll see more of it in the coming weeks: response driven features, a new collective I’m building, and anything else I can think of to create interesting comics.

The timing alone suggests that it's bad news -- when you want to bury something, you announce it on Friday afternoon. Beyond that, the post is frustratingly vague. What, exactly, is going to happen? Apparently there will be comics, but not as much as before, and not as much from the people whose work we have been enjoying up till now. Are we supposed to be excited about that?

Put this together with this article about changes at Medium, and things start to look more grim:

"Medium is not a publishing tool," CEO Ev Williams wrote in the announcement. "It's a network. A network of ideas that build off each other. And people. And GIFs."

Wait, don't we have Tumblr for that? In fact, while The Nib is (was) sort of like a really good comics magazine, with a curator and paid contributors, Medium itself is a really a publishing platform, a bit like WordPress but nicer and more organized. I'll confess I haven't paid a lot of attention to it outside of The Nib, so I'm not sure whether it's curated or whether writers are paid, but I have read some quality articles there in the past year.

What's concerning is that The Nib may shift to one of those awful "user-generated content" models where basically contributors are expected to post things for free. Go back to the Bors quote about "response driven features." The post it links to is simply a quote from Garry Trudeau about Charlie Hebdo and an invitation for readers to respond. If that's what's replacing the Eleanor Davis comics, no thanks! I turn to The Nib for smart content, not Facebook arguments, and anyway, no one took the bait — there is not a single response to that "response-driven feature."

In this world of Tumblr and Buzzfeed, The Nib really stood out as a good example of the traditional model done right. With Bors at the helm, there is still hope that it continue to be a smart and worthwhile site, but the message that is being sent right now, that a site that gives cartoonists regular paying work is not sustainable, is a sobering one for creators and readers alike.