Some of the old magazine publishers are exploiting their brands by having stables of people throwing up whatever topical crap pops into their brain, never mind quality or accuracy, so there is clearly some market for topical writing (seems to me the tendency for articles to occasionally get huge attention drives posting lots of articles).

If Medium can build a brand around having decent recent articles, more power to them (I see svbtle as the same thing, with different ideas about curation).