The widely-heralded Vox.com news magazine website, owned by Vox Media, Inc. (a company renamed over the past year, and originally operating under the monicker, “SB Nation,” which was once owned outright by Markos Moulitsas and his business partners), has gone live in the past few hours, as noted by the NY Times (see story/excerpt, below). When I last checked, Kos was still a member of its relatively small (six or seven people) Board of Directors.
IMHO, from what I’ve seen of the site over the past couple of hours, it's already a winner, visually. The news/feature story website is quite cool, from a tech standpoint (more about this in the NY Times’ article, as well; but, I haven’t had the opportunity to explore all of it yet); and its innovative technology is a very big part of "the story," itself (again, more about this from the NY Times, below).
GE is the primary sponsor of the website’s launch, and the venture capital firms (since 2008, Vox has raised $80 million) behind SB Nation/Vox.com are led by Accel Partners and Comcast Interactive Capital.
So, instead of engaging in an exercise of inferior journalistic redundance, I’ll just point you to the NY Times’ story on the debut of Vox.com…
Vox.com Takes Melding of Journalism and Technology to Next Level
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
NEW YORK TIMES
APRIL 6, 2014
WASHINGTON — Ask Ezra Klein what prompted him to leave a high-profile position at The Washington Post to start a new website, and the answer is a little wonkish, even for the founder of the newspaper’s Wonkblog, a mix of politics, economics and domestic policy that had become must reading in the Beltway.
It was, in essence, about content management systems, Mr. Klein said.
“We were badly held back not just by the technology, but by the culture of journalism there,” he said of The Post, as he offered a preview of his new site, Vox.com, which was scheduled to be introduced Sunday night.
While The Post is an excellent publication, he said, he felt that the conventions of newspaper print journalism in general, with its commitment to incremental daily coverage, were reflected in its publishing system that needed first and foremost to meet the needs of printing a daily paper. And he wanted to create something entirely new, which is why he and two Post colleagues ended up at Vox Media, a rising digital empire that includes sites like SB Nation and The Verge. Vox, he said, had the tools he was seeking…
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Former Washington Post journalist and blogger Ezra Klein is running the editorial side of the business. Here’s his intro post…
Welcome to Vox: a work in progress
Updated by Ezra Klein, Melissa Bell, Matt Yglesias on April 6, 2014, 4:28 p.m. ET
Welcome to Vox.com! Again!
On March 9, we launched Vox.com, which included our first videos, and we started talking to readers on our Facebook page and on our Twitter feed. Today marks phase two of Vox’s launch: the beginning of our effort to build the vast repository of information that will make it possible for us to explain the news in real time.
At the core of this phase are the Vox Cards. They’re inspired by the highlighters and index cards that some of us used in school to remember important information. You’ll find them attached to articles, where they add crucial context; behind highlighted words, where they allow us to offer deeper explanations of key concepts; and in their stacks, where they combine into detailed — and continuously updated — guides to ongoing news stories. We’re incredibly excited about them.
But we're just starting to learn how to use them. We have been employees of Vox Media for less than 65 days. The product team began work on the site seven weeks ago. Most of our staff started three or four weeks ago. Some people haven’t even been here a full week. Several key positions remain unfilled. But we didn’t want to wait a day longer than necessary to launch the site…
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Here are the top three stories there, as you read this (at the moment I published this post)…
The Republicans’ plan to cut Medicaid, explained
Updated by Sarah Kliff on April 6, 2014, 4:30 p.m. ET
You’re less likely to die in a car crash nowadays — here’s why
Updated by Susannah Locke on April 6, 2014, 4:32 p.m. ET
Welcome to Vox: a work in progress
Updated by Ezra Klein, Melissa Bell, Matt Yglesias on April 6, 2014, 4:28 p.m. ET
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Congratulations, Markos!
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