As publishing tools have become cheaper and more distributed, many have benefited from this ongoing democratization of distribution — whether it’s Twitter (s twtr) users posting newsworthy updates from war zones, or would-be authors publishing their thoughts on Medium. That’s the power of a platform that allows anyone to publish. It’s when the line blurs between platform and publisher that things start to get tricky, not just for writers but for readers as well.

In a recent post at Re/code, Jonathan Glick of Sulia — which is itself both a social-media platform and a publisher — came up with a rather ugly portmanteau of a word to describe this phenomenon: he called them “platishers,” a term that not unsurprisingly unleashed a storm of ridicule from media insiders on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/jbenton/status/431907405056978944

But while Glick’s chosen term borders on the gag-inducing, what he describes is very real. There is a whole…