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.

Two of the many consequences of this evolving landscape are that the news industry must continue to seek out ways to monetize quality journalism, and that important, interesting stories that are outside of the daily conversation are at increasing risk of getting lost in the churn.

It’s at this particular moment that we’re excited to launch The Highlight by Vox, a new section that’s part of Apple News’s new subscription service, Apple News+. The Highlight is a dedicated home for the signature features, essays, and explainers that are of the news but not on the news.

Consider this section a premium complement to our free daily coverage — a space dedicated to helping our audience understand not the most talked-about headlines of the day but the big ideas and issues that are changing our present and influencing our future.

In The Highlight, you’ll find in-depth features, conversation-driving essays, on-the-ground dispatches, deep Q&As, and profiles that put a spotlight on the people who are influencing policy, culture, technology, and academia. With regular contributions from Vox staff writers whom our audience has come to know and trust, along with a diverse range of new voices and contributors, we’ll build a smart, deeply satisfying collection of articles that will inform and surprise readers.

We chose to launch The Highlight on Apple News because we think it’s the right platform, at the right time, for us to continue to explore Vox subscription offerings. Apple doesn’t just rely on algorithms for its news judgment — it employs a staff of experienced journalists to uphold editorial standards. We have a large, consistent audience on the platform. And the scope of Apple News’s reach is impressive.

This partnership allows us to reach a broader audience while expanding on the journalism we want to do and that we want our audience to see — without compromising on our mission. Additionally, our participation in Apple News+ is a crucial step in defining our own plans around membership. Later this year, Vox will launch membership tiers, and, as Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff said recently, “We’re not going to take away anything you’re already getting. But it will add to the experience.”

For now, all the stories on The Highlight will be exclusive to Apple News+ for a week after they publish, and will then be available on Vox.com. Head over to Apple News+ to check them out. And stay tuned for what’s next in this space from Vox.

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?

But as we set out to recruit a team, and as we started reading résumés and conducting interviews, we got really excited. There were people out there who had a great understanding of the Vox brand and a great vision for what that brand ought to mean on Discover.

Fundamentally, it means storytelling that is optimized for the format. It’s vertical. It’s visual. It’s swipeable. It’s very new.

But it’s also old. On Discover we publish one “edition” per day, a rhythm that would be familiar to a newspaper veteran but takes some getting used to if you’ve spent your whole career on the web. That means becoming thoughtful about a whole new set of design and editorial questions. How does one story flow into another? What goes first, and what goes last? And in a universe where you’re not able to go for quantity over quality, how do you really polish your work and make it shine for modern audiences using modern devices?

We’ve come up with something that we are incredibly proud of: a truly mobile-first multimedia experience with great performance and beautiful graphics.

You’ll find our editions every day at 6 am, frequently — though not always — with the entire edition focused on a single topic or theme.

You’ll find a lot of great Vox stories and videos on our channel, but this isn’t just a place where we’ll be pushing content from our website. It’s a unique experience, uniquely suited to contemporary habits, that just happens to be fueled by the same values — an emphasis on explanation, a preference for the important over the new, and a determination to speak to people in a way that is both clear and serious — that power our website, our YouTube page, our Facebook and Twitter offerings, our newsletter, and everything else we do.

We expect that a large share of the audience we find on Discover will be people who aren’t necessarily familiar with us from our website, and that’s great. We’re excited to introduce Vox to the growing and curious audience on Snapchat.

Check it out.

Download Snapchat for iPhone from the Apple store.

Download Snapchat for Android from the Google Play store.