It's worse than that. It's essentially a social media feed based around a few people. Most of their articles are like this one where it's regurgitated writing or reporting that another outfit reported something. Actually if you visit many of The Vox "culture" sites you will see this trend. A lot of the times it will be a brief summary of a video someone else produced. A good example is The Vox McDonald's coffee lawsuit article[0] that summarizes an Adam Ruins Everything video on the subject.

We live in an age where blogging careers required tricking Google algorithms to thinking your site was valuable in order to increase traffic and thus serve ads to consumers (or grab their email for later product blasts, for example signing up for a free ebook on passive income). This trend spiraled into "spinning articles" which essentially was a method of using software to change articles via word/sentence substitution. The spun articles would then be posted to similar websites that then linked back to one of your main sites. All of them nicely littered with ads of course and leading you in a research circle. This of course evolved into clickbait headlines. Buzzfeed and its ilk are born to maximize this growing pile of garbage echoing, and labels itself as a brilliant strategy which is then echoed out again. Release a few high quality long form articles every once in a while, call yourself journalism instead of blogging (difference being the above strategies and highly opinionated pieces), badda-bing-badda-boom, media is changed. Now instead of reporting on a subject, we regurgitate something else for a few sentences and post the source and call it a day. No understanding, investigation, expansion, or reworking required because the author is no longer writing for an audience but instead for an advertiser click minimum.

It's not hard to understand why The Verge specifically went from long form tech website to culture slog (sloppy whatever goes weblog).

I'm not saying there isn't good journalism/ists out there. I'm saying somethings were lost and confused along the way for many reasons. /rant

[0] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/16/13971482/...