How we make Vox

When I made the decision to come to Vox shortly after it launched, I was excited about its founders’ vision for an explanatory news brand. But more than that vision itself, what convinced me to leave a job I enjoyed for the great unknown of a startup that had been around for just two months was the unwavering dedication to that vision, and belief in its promise, that radiated from Vox’s founders Ezra Klein, Melissa Bell, and Matt Yglesias.

Through the chaos and learning-as-we-go vibe of those early months, and, later, unsettling shifts in the digital media business, Vox has had an anchor: a pristine clarity of purpose that’s translated across beats, platforms, and mediums. We explain. We give the context. We go deep. We put our audience first.

You know that look new parents get: equal parts terrified and overflowing with pride, all mixed with acute sleep deprivation. That’s the only way to describe what Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Melissa Bell, and I looked like in June 2014 when we sat down with Lauren Williams to convince her to be our managing editor. I have to blame the sleep deprivation on the fact that we decided to woo a candidate that we were desperate to land by taking her to a shitty dive bar that smelled like piss.

But crammed into that little booth over cheap beers, I will never forget the way we spoke about building Vox. Matt talked about the home we’d found in Vox Media and how they built our website in nine weeks and were letting us play with new formats and ways of displaying information. Melissa talked about the culture we were creating, one of making collaboration easy and rewarding weird and wild ideas. And Ezra talked about his early experience as a news consumer feeling embarrassed when he would come to an article and not understand the backstory — and how we wanted to build a space for curious people to engage with the most important news stories of the day.

Five years ago, Vox launched with a goal to bring audiences the most important context needed to understand the news — and the world around us.

As our talented journalists and editors have delivered on that mission again and again over the past five years, the world has become more complicated, intense, and all-consuming. At the same time, many of the platforms on which audiences consume the news have become more crowded and untrustworthy for users, while hurting the reputable news businesses they rely on for content.

A few years ago, I was writing up a short article at the Washington Post explaining why then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was voting against his own cloture motion. In the middle of the piece, I stopped typing and was seized with the thought: “God … why does this even matter?” It just felt so low-stakes, so unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Indeed, who even remembers the Chuck Hagel confirmation fight five years later?

I said something to my then-editor, Ezra Klein, and he replied, “If we only wrote about stuff that’s really, really important, we’d write about nothing but, I don’t know, malaria.”

If you want to understand a culture, take a look at how its people spend their money.

Trends and popular products offer a fascinating glimpse into people’s joys and anxieties, their moments of prosperity and times of desperation, and their privileges and disadvantages. They also reflect how our way of life is changing — from the technology we invest in to the companies we choose to trust and support.

On Wednesday, Vox is launching Explained, a new show on Netflix. Every episode is a roughly 15-minute dive into a topic that drives our lives or our world. The first three, which cover DNA editing, monogamy, and the racial wealth gap, are available now. You can watch the show — or add it to your Netflix queue for later — here. I hope you will.

From now through the rest of the season, we will launch a new episode every Wednesday. This is also Vox’s first truly global product: Each episode will be in 191 countries, dubbed into four languages and subtitled in 23 more.

The news can be overwhelming. The stakes seem higher than ever, the headlines come at you fast, and it gets harder and harder to keep up with the most important stories of the day.

And that’s why we launched a daily news explainer podcast called Today, Explained.

The news today can be overwhelming. The stakes seem higher than ever, the headlines come at you fast, and it gets harder and harder to keep up with the most important stories of the day.

Do you ever get to the end of your work day and wonder what the hell just happened in the world? I know I do, and I work in the news.

There are big changes afoot at Vox! We’re headed to television. We’re launching a daily podcast. We have a new editor-in-chief, and a new executive editor and director of editorial strategy. And my role is changing, too! Here’s the memo I sent to the Vox team on what’s coming next.

I write with exciting news. Effective immediately, Lauren Williams will be Vox’s new editor-in-chief. Allison Rockey will be our new executive editor and director of editorial strategy. And I’ll be Vox’s editor-at-large.

The day after the election, Vox health reporter Sarah Kliff sent out a tweet with a request: She wanted to talk to people who relied on Obamacare coverage and were worried about what the law’s repeal could mean for them.

The 250-plus responses she got came from all over the country. It quickly became clear that not only is there a large group of Americans who are unsure of what will happen next with their health coverage, but they wanted to talk about it.

Programming note from Vox general manager Andrew Golis: When Melissa, Matt, and Ezra started Vox, they wrote on a regular basis about the challenges, experiments, and successes they had building the team and brand. But then they got busy building the team and brand! In 2017, we’re bringing the “How we make Vox” writing back. Sometimes, I’ll offer updates on experiments and projects. Other times, like this, we’ll share internal news and thinking about what we’re doing.

Today, a 2017 memo from Vox editor in chief Ezra Klein about some exciting leadership changes and how we’re attacking the challenge of covering the policy and politics of the dawning Trump era. If you have questions, concerns, or compliments to send our way, you can always reach me at andrew.golis@voxmedia.com.

Programming note from Melissa Bell: When we first started Vox, I loved to write about building this company. But as our team has grown, and our work did too, those public notes fell by the wayside. It’s been almost a year since we last added to “How we make Vox.” I’d like to change that, starting now. I want us to re-engage in a conversation with you, our readers, about how we’re doing, and what we should be doing next. You helped us build this brand into something bigger and better than I ever imagined. And I’m so excited for the next stage of growth.

To start, here’s a note we sent to the Vox.com team this morning. It’s celebratory, because we’re excited about the work we’ve done, and the work we’ll get to do with Andrew Golis, but we’ll hopefully write about both the good and the difficult lessons in the future. If there’s a topic you’d like to hear about from us, feel free to send me an idea at melissa@vox.com. Thanks!

Hey, Team!

When the opportunity to do a Discover channel on Snapchat presented itself, we were, naturally, excited. The Snapchat platform clearly offered an unparalleled opportunity to reach a giant population of digital natives.

And, to be honest, some of us were also skeptical: Could we deliver a strong editorial package on a platform we primarily knew as a way to send quick visual notes to friends?

I’m going to make some predictions about the future of the media in this piece, and they come with the disclaimer that predictions always come with: They could be entirely wrong. The media is moving fast, and what looks like an unstoppable trend today might seem like a hilarious detour a year from now. (Remember, for instance, when the iPad launched, and apps were going to save journalism? Lol.)

But my guess is that within three years, it will be normal for news organizations of even modest scale to be publishing to some combination of their own websites, a separate mobile app, Facebook Instant Articles, Apple News, Snapchat, RSS, Facebook Video, Twitter Video, YouTube, Flipboard, and at least one or two major players yet to be named. The biggest publishers will be publishing to all of these simultaneously.

I started as a blogger in the pre-social web, when the only way to build an audience was to have other sites quote or link to your work. Those links didn’t drive a ton of traffic back to the original site, but they drove some, and sometimes you would get a new regular reader out of the deal. And that was basically how my career began. Everything I wrote, I wrote in the hopes that someone else would take it and try to use it on their site, with a link back to my site.

The lesson of that, to me, was that writing on the internet is a positive-sum endeavor: I was creating content that helped other people make their sites better, and in using that content, they were helping me grow my site.

April 7 is a glorious day in history: it marks the first Voxiversary. While it hasn’t yet attained the status of Christmas or Passover or Easter or July 4 or Thanksgiving or even April Fools’ Day, it is a very important day for us at Vox, and we hope it wins a place in your heart alongside Franksgiving and other novelty celebrations.

Voxiversary commemorates the first full day of publishing internet content on Vox.com. We released some videos before that (this interview with the great Elizabeth Kolbert, for example), and we were discussing health-care news with readers on our Facebook page even earlier than that, so there’s a case to be made that the true anniversary was at some point in February or March. But decisions have to be made, and there’s something special about the launch of a full-time website.

One of things we’re exploring at Vox.com is how to make better use of all the reporting, writing, and coding we’ve done before today.

One of our experiments with this is the card stacks, where our writers can filter their daily reporting into a larger, deeper, and continuously updated topic resource. But during the perennially slow news period of mid-December, we decided to try something a little unusual.

In early July, I started working on what I thought would be a story explaining why teen births had declined so steeply since 2007. It didn’t exactly work out that way.

The researchers interviewed all agreed that the decline was giant: teen births fell 37 percent between 2007 and 2012. What they hadn’t figured out was why. Nobody knew what particular change or policy had catalyzed such a massive drop.

Vox.com has a fancy new homepage.

It’s pretty good looking, if I do say so myself (and I can say that because I really have nothing to do with the design, except for the occasional, “Ooooo, that looks nice!” comment).

During April, our product team spent the month focused on a litany of small fixes, necessary improvements to the site, and different tools for the editorial team as they settled into telling stories every day.

In our second month, we were able to shift our focus back to site building and big picture planning. Today, you’ll see the result of that work, and the first big addition to the site: our card stack hub and explore card.

Whatever the new homepage is, and despite the warnings in that grainy graph, we still want one.

When we launched Vox, we built it on the same code base as SB Nation, the sports site in our Vox Media family. We did this to save time and get our site up and running in just nine weeks. To develop and design a different homepage that works across multiple platforms, and with all sorts of content would have taken much, much longer.

Over on the Vox Media Product blog, Michael Lovitt, the vice president of engineering, wrote an article on how we got this site up and running in nine weeks.

It all started January 27, when Lovitt sent an email to the product directors at Vox Media:

It’s been three weeks since we started publishing on Vox full time — and they’ve been a pretty incredible three weeks. We talked to Thomas Piketty and Michael Pollan. We traveled to Vermont to understand their single-payer system; we asked porn stars about their families; and we explored the necrophiliac nature of otters. We worked hard to explain the Common Core, Ukraine, Obamacare, and Bitcoin. We asked why “basic” became an insult and what a broken political system means for the future of the internet.

At the end of each day, we felt amazed by how much we learned — about the world and about how you, our readers, feel about our site. We watched how you’re finding our stories, which ones you’re reading, and what you’re doing once you get to Vox. We’ve heard from you on Facebook and on Twitter and by email.

New York Magazine’s Joe Coscarelli interviewed Ezra Klein about the philosophy behind Vox. Here Ezra explains that it’s good for journalists to write pieces about what time the Super Bowl is on because many people would like to know what time the Super Bowl is on, so someone should create a resource that tells them:

Read the whole thing here.