Vox Media Partners with WordPress VIP | Hacker News Reader

Vox Media Partners with WordPress VIP

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34 pointsdonohoe17 comments

I can't not point out how ironic this is.

In the early Vox/Verge years they couldn't spend a month without talking about their super "publishing platform"/CMS ( Chorus ) and that included video interviewing "cool" dudes at their "cool" offices at their "cool" NYC neighborhood.

Now they'll be running WordPress and will be dealing with WordPress VIP.. I mean, good luck I guess.

On a more positive note, this is a cycle of life. Great, genuine and honest content will always be king. Gawker, Vice, The Verge.. are going into irrelevancy just like everybody else as times change and the ones with talent, drive and work ethic will have their place even if running just a Perl script or some weird Lisp beige site.

So chorus is done? Does this mean all the VM properties are about to get a facelift? Or are they gonna do the stupid thing and customize WP until they’re basically maintaining a a fully custom CMS anyway just so they don’t have to change anything on the front end?

ETA: maybe I just don’t know what wpVIP is. It looks like the partnership is more about sharing VM technology with Wordpress vs moving to the WP CMS platform

Wordpress can also be used in headless mode. Meaning front stack can be anything, while wordpress only works as the backend.

This is a really big "get" for WordPress. Despite being challenged on all sides with numerous alternatives, this does prove the staying power of their platform as a CMS.

This may have more to do with the 20% stake that Penske Media Corporation (PMC) has in Vox Media [0] than with some kind of rational decision-making process? PMC is a major user of WordPress VIP. The Concert and Coral deals look more like a buyback than an earnest partnership.

[0] https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/pmc-acquires-vox-media...

Having worked with WordPress VIP, I have no idea why anyone would partner with them. They did nothing but disappoint our client.

Probably cost cutting by a bean-counter VP.

I am confident this will work out as dissapointing as you would expect.

How did they disappoint? Can you please add more on this?

I don't mean to seem abrupt, but I'm not sure what is so interesting about this press release.

From the early days Vox and sites like Polygon and TheVerge were pretty open and proud about their custom CMS and publishing platform. It is pretty surprising to see them abandon Chorus. Also interesting that they think Coral, a tolerable-at-best comments platform, is appealing for other customers.

A glimpse at the recent history of Chorus as a stand-alone product: https://product.voxmedia.com/chorus

Yea, I was initially thinking they were dropping their CMS in favor of WP, but it looks more like the partnership is more about selling Vox tech on WP’s platform.

No, see the earlier Axios article: https://www.axios.com/2023/07/18/vox-media-chorus

> Details: Vox Media will move its own websites off of Chorus and into WordPress VIP, the enterprise arm of the 20-year-old CMS company.

Oh wow, their tech stack is a little confusing then, they’ll be using WP for CMS and duet for the actual publishing. But isn’t WP kinda terrible as a pure CMS, like the whole power is that you get an easy barebones cms with a really powerful front end… at least that’s how I see it.

I'm biased[0], but, no, there are hundreds of news organizations using WordPress for publishing. It's the industry standard.

[0] https://newspack.com/

Coral ruined so many good sports blogs on SBNation.

Still doesn't seem interesting. Companies change over time, with turnover and all. The people that were involved with those early decisions are likely not there anymore, and that's one of any possible reasons behind such a priority shift...

There was a period (roughly the second term of Obama) where tech/media/politics was very intertwined. People moved from media to the Obama admin, which had a close relationship with big tech, and then onto leadership positions in big tech.

Vox was the pinnacle of this, a very technocratic liberal publication which raised a lot of money telling investors it was a tech company (hence the focus on the CMS).

This broke down after the 2016 election as the media blamed the tech industry for the election result (leading the NYT to set a editorial policy that tech must be covered in a negative light), and also had to focus on ideology over technocracy (which is why the wonkier people at Vox got slowly pushed out). The gap between politics and tech also grew as there was no path from the Trump admin to tech leadership (or vice versa).

Meanwhile youtube & twitter grew, making big media less and less relevant.

So this is an interesting if expected outcome as Vox has slowly dwindled in value.

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