Vox Overview

Vox

Introduction

The entertainment and communications industry is a rapidly growing industry with new companies and websites being formed every day. There are only a few of these companies that tend to stand out. There are also only a few who can keep up with the generational changes, remain innovative and stand the test of time.

Vox is one of these few companies that has managed to stand out and grow tremendously through the years. Through its innovative way of making the news more interesting to viewers, while also educating, it has been able to build its site into a world-known news platform.

History

Vox is an American news and opinion website. The website is noted for its concept of explanatory journalism. The site’s mission is to make news more digestible.

The idea was to make the ‘vegetables’ or ‘spinach’ of the news world, (those articles we should read but don’t) more palatable. “It’s a terrible attitude, if we can’t take things that are important and meaningful in people’s lives and make them interesting, that failure is 100% on us writers. That is entirely our fault” says Klein. Klein expected to “improve the technology of news” and build an online platform better equipped for making news understandable.

 It is owned by Vox Media. Vox Media is an online publisher focused on sports, personal technology, and gaming categories. It also owns SB Nation, The Verge, Polygon, Racked, Curbed, and Vox Creative.

Vox Media started in 2003 as a sports blog, AthleticsNation.com, written by Tyler Bleszinski, a former Orange County Register reporter. With traffic growing quickly, professional managers took over the site, rolled it into a broader corporate umbrella of SB Nation in 2009, and added more sports blogs.

 Vox was launched at Vox Media in 2014 by left-wing journalists and activists Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, and Melissa Bell. Vox in line with other Vox Media sites has also expanded its online presence into podcasts and video. This includes a YouTube channel, several podcasts, and a show presented on Netflix.

Vox is best known for its explanatory articles and videos that aim to teach readers all they need to know about the topic. According to Publisher Melissa Bell, “We want people to think of Vox as the organization that not only explains the news of the day but explains all of the news.”

These explanatory videos and articles range from Fashion to Pop culture to complex sociopolitical topics, to economics, to Partisan politics.

You can find Vox wherever you live on the internet- Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Email, iTunes, and many more.

Leadership

When Vox was launched in 2014, Klein was editor-in-chief with Yglesias sharing executive editor responsibilities with Bell, who also served as a senior product manager.

In September 2017, Klein announced that he would be taking up a new role as editor-at-large, handing over the editor-in-chief role to Lauren Williams, who had joined Vox a few months after its founding and had previously been an editor at the left-wing magazine ‘Mother Jones’. Klein also announced that Vox’s new executive editor and director of editorial strategy would be Allison Rockey, who had previously been the director of social media at the technology firm behind the 2008 and 2012 Obama presidential campaigns.

In late 2020, Klein, Williams, and Yglesias left the site. While Vox had been founded with prominent journalists, Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff said that their brands had mature, mainstream personalities that no longer relied on personalities.

Swati Sharma was named editor-in-chief in February 2021. A managing editor of The Atlantic at the time of her appointment, she was expected to assume the position in March 2021.

Types of Content Vox Creates

According to Vox’s founding editors, the site seeks to explain news by providing additional contextual information not usually found in traditional news sources.

VIDEO

Vox has a YouTube channel called vox which currently has over 1400 videos uploaded on it and a growing subscriber count of 10 million. They have regularly posted videos on news and informational subjects since 2014 on this video channel. Videos uploaded on this platform are usually accompanied by an article on their website, usually covering the same themes. As of today, August 2022, the channel has over 2.9 billion views.

Their content involves current affairs, a timeline of certain events, and interesting facts.

In May 2018, Vox partnered with Netflix to release a weekly TV show called ‘Explained’.

PODCASTS

 Vox distributes seven podcasts, all hosted by Vox staff. They believe their podcasts help you understand the world.

Today, Explained:

Today, Explained is Vox’s daily news explainer podcast. It is hosted by Sean Rameswaram and Noel King to guide you through the most important stories of the day. It is available to listen to on public radio stations across the US.

Vox Conversations:

Vox Conversations is hosted by Sean Illing and his colleagues around the Vox. They have deep discussions and conversations that will cause you to question old assumptions and think about the world and our role in it in a new light.

Unexplainable:

Unexplainable is a science show about everything we don’t know. Host Noam Hassenfeld is joined by an array of experts and Vox reporters each week to look at the most fascinating unanswered questions in science and the mind-bending ways scientists are trying to answer them.

The Weeds:

The weeds is hosted by Dylan Matthews, Dara Lind, and other voices. They dig into the weeds on important national issues, including health care, immigration, housing, and everything else that matters.

Longform:

Through interviews with top nonfiction writers, editors, audio storytellers, and documentarians, Longform explores the work and careers of some of our era’s greatest creators. Longform is the go-to place to hear about the craft of true storytelling- from war reporting to art criticism- and the struggles and triumphs that never show up in the final work. You will also hear the icons of nonfiction talk about their work, but also about their deep human experiences, insecurities, triumphs, and struggles.

Recode media:

Recode media is hosted by Peter Kafka, one of the industry’s most acclaimed media editors. He talks to business titans, journalists, comedians, and fellow podcasters to get their take.

Land of the Giants:

Land of the Giants is hosted by senior reporters Shirin Ghaffary and Alex Heath. They bring us inside the company formerly known as Facebook during an unprecedented moment of transition.

Other previous podcasts hosted by Vox include; Recode Daily, Future Perfect, Vox Quick Hits, Worldly, The Impact, and Impeachment, Explained.

Digital articles

Vox’s website is home to numerous articles. Their articles educate their audience through politics and policy, business and pop culture, food, science, and everything else that matters.

Errors in publication

Vox reporters have published several erroneous factual reports on the website, especially in the site’s early years.

In 2014, Vox writer Zack Beauchamp published an article titled ’11 crucial facts to understand the Israel- Gaza crisis” with the purpose of explaining the background of Israel’s 2014 Operation Protective Edge. In the initial draft of the article, Beauchamp claimed that the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip were “connected only by a bridge that Israel limits traffic on”; the two noncontiguous territories are separated by land (undisputed Israeli territory) and no such structure exists or ever existed. The elementary error led to widespread criticism of the site.

Many other examples of Vox reporters circulating unverified internet rumors, making basic factual mistakes, and misrepresenting source data have also been published. This has forced the site to make corrections.

The company has also been criticized for promoting violent behavior when Contributor Emmett Rensin posted a series of tweets calling for anti-trump riots, including one on June 3, 2016, that urged “If trump comes to your town, start a riot.” The tweets drew attention after violent anti-trump protests took place in San Jose, California, on the day of Rensin’s tweet. He was later suspended due to this.

Vox Media bias rating

Vox’s parent company, Vox Media, was founded and is run largely by individuals with a history of connections to the Democratic Party and backgrounds in left-wing activism. It was originally founded by left-wing activist and Howard Deam campaign strategist Jerome Armstrong, left-wing activist and Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, and sports blogger Tyler Blezinslki. Currently, Vox Media’s president Marty Moe, chief financial officer Steve Swad, and chief communications officer Meredith Webster all served in staff positions in Democratic administrations. The chief operating officer Trei Brundett Led digital strategy for the 2008 campaign of U.S. Senator Mark Warner (D-Virginia).

Despite evidence that American journalists are significantly more likely to identify with the Democratic Party than the Republican Party, reports that 96% of journalists’ political donations in 2016 went to Hillary Clinton, and the fact that media companies donate far more to Democratic candidates than Republican candidates, Vox cofounder and editor at large Matt Yglesias has nonetheless argued that “television news loves Republicans” and that mainstream TV news has a bias toward Republican guests and airing speeches by Republican politicians. He has written that this is because “Rich shareholders”, “Rich executives” and “Rich anchors benefit objectively from Trump winning.”

Klein has claimed that he has no ideological affiliation, saying, “I don’t really think of myself as a liberal. That is not the project I’m a part of, which is to let the facts take me where they do”

However, in a February 2015 magazine article, Political senior media critic Jack Shafer wrote dismissing Vox’s claims of partisan neutrality.

Vox also came under attack from the left in 2016 for promoting Hillary Clinton’s campaign over that of Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primaries through coverage that attacked Sanders’ policies and promoted Clinton’s under the guise of ‘explaining’ them.

In September 2018, the team at allsides.com conducted an extensive editorial review and decided to shift Vox from a Lean Left to a Left media bias rating. The team found that Vox consistently wrote favorably about left-leaning policies and never included a right-leaning perspective. The team also noted that Vox often framed news and issues as if the left perspective were the only perspective, and its hard news articles included commentary that was subjective. Vox often blurred the line between news and editorial.

In April 2022, a member of the allsides.com team conducted an independent review of Vox bias and confirmed the Left bias rating.

Criticisms

In March 2014, before it had officially launched, Vox was criticized by conservative media commentators, including Erick Erickson, for a video it had published.

Vox has also been criticized by left-of-center media critics for allowing advertisers and investors to influence its media coverage. The left-wing media criticism organization ‘Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting(FAIR)’ has accused Vox of failing to disclose potential financial conflicts of interest in its coverage, including in an April 2016 article by Yglesias about a Vox advertiser Goldman Sachs-sponsored education program in Utah.

Vox has also met criticism from a lot of journalists who do not work at Vox due to the type of explanatory Journalism it uses to pass its message.

On Trustpilot, Vox currently has 90% bad reviews with some people calling the news outlet a “waste of time”, “Liars with hidden agendas”, “attention-seeking morons” and many more.

Vox’s editorial strategy revamp

In October 2021, Vox eliminated its identities section, which covered a range of topics, including Criminal justice, race, religion, gender, and drugs. It was an odd move considering the industry’s heightened consciousness of social issues over the last year and a half.

However, this was all part of refining Vox’s editorial strategy so that all of its stories across sections are told through an intersectional lens, rather than confining race and identity-related stories under one catch-all section.

Vox’s mission, as Sharma and her team, redefined it, is to still explain the news, but in a way that empowers people with the information and insight, they need to understand the world around them.  It aims to do that by providing clarity and context in easy-to-digest language, this isn’t to say that Vox wasn’t doing these things before, but part of redoing the editorial strategy is to have that guideline clearly laid out for staff to refer back to and make sure every story fits that bill.

In talking with editors, they came up with the six types of stories that Vox writers do well. Going forward, a Vox story is one that either brings clarity to chaos; dissects complicated policies or ideas; connects something to the larger stakes; explores solutions or emerging ideas to solve problems; helps readers make decisions, or surfaces something hidden in plain sight. Sharma wants writers and editors to look at issues of race, gender, and identity as central to many of the stories they tell. The stories should also give readers the big picture and offer distinction. She believes the editorial strategy is and should always be evolving.

Funding

Vox is owned by Vox media. Vox Media has raised a total of $307.6 Million in funding over 9 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on August 12, 2015, from a series F round where they were able to raise $200 Million. Vox Media is funded by 12 investors with NBCUniversal and General Atlantic being its most recent investors.

With Vox constantly evolving, it is not a surprise how much it has grown. Its TikTok account which was opened just a bit over a year ago has amassed over 100,00 followers. This shows how fluid it is and how it is able to utilize every new technology to its advantage. Following this path, Vox will only continue to be successful and wax stronger.