Vox Media Acquiring ReCode
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The typical "person on the street" doesn't care about "tech" as an individual topic, nor for publications like Gigaom, TechCrunch, or ReCode. They'll take tech flavored news in their stream as it comes whatever the source (and folks like the BBC, CNN, the NYT, etc, all do a good job of it anyway).
The people who work in and live and breathe "tech" (e.g. us) and who do really care aren't considered to be "enough" for a mass market site. It's ridiculous a newish site with 1.5 million uniques a month is classified as "struggled to draw significant traffic" in an industry that employs around 6.5 million Americans in all. The "genericization" of tech media as mass market media is horrid - look at how insipid the stories TechCrunch covers nowadays, for example.
I think people need to rework their assumptions about what "tech" is, how it relates to the media as a whole, and to get used to the idea that tech-specific media is (and should be) almost (but not quite) as niche as media aimed at medical professionals, lawyers, people in aviation, or similar groups.
Mac users used to clamor for the latest processor news because there was no computer available which was fast enough; a 7,200 RPM drive had to be a big deal because everyone spent time waiting on their slow 5,400RPM drive. Digital photographers anxiously awaited better sensitivity, lower noise, storage speed, etc. but it's been years since a good phone camera was adequate for most people and even discerning types were more likely to be held back by skill or lenses than their DSLR.Even on HN, I'd bet most readers would take a LONG time to notice if someone secretly their Core i7 with an i5.
http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/26/8662905/the-verge-and-reco...
It reports 81M US visitors/month for the entire Vox network (https://www.quantcast.com/p-d9vfr8QTWnv1E) and 13M for The Verge (https://www.quantcast.com/theverge.com).
That actually lines up pretty closely, so it's likely they were talking about US visitors rather than global (which is ~2x for The Verge).
(Disclaimer: I used to work on Quantcast's measurement product).
Honestly I expected higher for The Verge but then again I'm an Ars guy myself.
Soon in tech news -"Why Western Digital Black and Red hard drives are actually increasing racism in america? See in those 48 charts that we have shown only 345 times"
They are very guilty of moreofthesamism
Vox is basically Fox News for liberals. Half troll, half entertaining articles.
The other issue is that millennials, especially technical and gaming are among the highest users of adblock which makes a material impact on ad revenue from the site. Either way, even doubling to 3M uniques per month is still a low number of overall users to sustain a single site.
It might work if part of a larger network, which is what will happen at Vox, but they seem to be hitting the saturation point too. Remember the Verge superbowl ad? It's nice to keep buying traffic and hiring writers as long as the VC money is there but it doesnt seem like they have sustainability figured out yet.
In any case, it's very interesting to watch how this unfolds.
Elite Daily is the perfect example of what the millennial generation is looking for. Shallow advice from fellow millennials with tech news sprinkled in with as much importance as think-pieces covering what it's like to be a millennial. Quantcast shows 30 million uniques for Elite Daily last month and that makes me think that it's going to continue to be difficult for tech-centric media to grow and gain sustained advertising dollars. I won't hide my disdain for fluff sites like Elite Daily, but my point is that Elite Daily is what these tech news websites are competing against, not each other.
My thought also. You can test this idea by replacing "tech" with finance, films, radio, farm machinary, mining equipment or any other money making sector of the market.
I often think of meta tech news as "news for tech-industry analysts".
Just goes to show how journalists (either the journalists described, or just the NYT author here) are charmed by the mystique of the CMS. I don't care if Chorus is made in Angular 5.0 [1], the robustness of a CMS is not one that makes much difference to the content producers, particularly writing-focused reporters...And the parts that need to be really nice UI/UX (such as slideshow/gallery/quiz creators) aren't necessarily intrinsic to a CMS. A CMS makes a huge deal in ease of publishing...but for most writers, they don't see much difference other than the rich-text editor. It's certainly at the far bottom of reasons to join an organization as a reporter.
[1] it's Rails 3.x IIRC, but perhaps Chorus also encompasses their suite of static publishing tools such as Middleman:
http://product.voxmedia.com/2014/5/29/5759244/vox-media-ruby...
https://source.opennews.org/en-US/learning/evolution-news-ap...
Articles about Vox Media never seem to fail to mention Chorus. As a news consumer, I don't give a crap about how the sausage is made: I want accurate reporting. I find Vox Media, of all the new media groups, to have a most embarrassing level of sloppy and inaccurate reporting. I can't tolerate blatant and lazy errors.
The focus on tools seems misplaced to me. They desperately need a quality system.
"But it's what you do that matters, not how you get it done!"
Yeah, sure.
I'm admittedly an atypical HN reader.
But then I also love C and hate everything Python with a passion, so go figure.
You really should not be looking at it as a CMS. It is a complete workflow system. In short, these are the systems that the business depends on to write stories, edit stories, publish stories, syndicate stories, promote stories, and so on.
An advantage of a proper system is not merely 10% efficiency: 1. It can impose a process, where none existed before. Perhaps, this can be a quality check process. It can be user feedback process. It can be promotion of journalists process. A process can improve operations and the outcome.
2. It can automate a process. Even if process exists today, if it is not automated, it may not be enforced. We do not have measurement on how well the process is adhered to; who is using it and who is not; what the costs of not using the process are.
3. It can optimize a process. If we can automate and measure, then improvement is natural.
In addition to all these process improvements, something like Chorus can even improve the way it is reaching the customers. For instance, the costs of pushing to different channels is negligible. Their cards based context education system is considered innovative in the industry.
If you look at the existing publishing platforms, you will understand how CMS can change the game. See more about Chorus here: http://pfauth.com/publishing-platforms/vox-medias-chorus . If you want to see the competition that the rest use, see: http://www.ccieurope.com/solutions/NewsGate/ (this is the new version-- think about the previous version and then you can understand the excitement about Chorus).
I appreciate your argument that these new CMS systems are better thought of as improved "journalism life cycle" management systems, to borrow a more familiar jargon.
Given that view, I would have to say that these tools are not good because the system output is not good. Every PLC system I've been a part of has a quality assurance component, and in the case of Vox Media, that quality component doesn't seem to be sufficiently engaged. More worrying to me is that when edits are made at vox.com (and I assume, perhaps in error, at other Vox Media sites), the changes tend to be as silent as possible. I can never be sure of the accuracy of the article I'm viewing. In addition, there are frankly immature actions of Vox Media staff (seems to be concentrated at The Verge) that signal to me that the company culture is problematic. I expect journalists to have an air of professionalism, like Walter Cronkite. I get the feeling that Vox Media is a bunch of bloggers acting as journalists, when the original concept (as I understood it) was that it was journalists that could respond with the speed and flexibility of bloggers, thanks to the Chorus system.
Maybe I expect too much from internet journalism. If you'll excuse me, I think there's some kids on my lawn I need to chase away.
Considering what Vox.com has turned into lately - not sure that mentioning Ezra is good thing. The old Wonkblog was classes above that crap.
When you've got a bunch of specialists, integrating the pieces is the challenge. Usually, you've got people responsible for broad swaths of the process: journos learning marketing; marketers learning copy editing; editors learning SEO. The CMS is where a lot of this gets created, integrated, and published.
The established media companies are struggling, if I had to describe in one line, because contemporary revenues cannot sustain their traditional cost structure.
You would otherwise need staff to coordinate between photographer, and onsite attendee and social media curator finding tweets to go with that story, and generally different parts being curated by different team members.
You also want to optimize the "review" workflow, to maximize the page views by landing the story quickly vs. other publications.
It's not really a material difference in terms of sustainability.
You are correct in stating that established media companies are struggling because of their cost structures. But those cost structures are mostly salaries (and capital investments in buildings etc) rather than something that a magic CMS can fix.
Put it like this: when a "new media journalist" uses their mobile phone to take a picture for their story (instead of a staff photographer) that has made a bigger difference in terms of cost structure than the worlds-best CMS can make.
Says something about Ars' business model, that a hoary old site seems to sustain itself with some throwback non-native ads and subscriptions, while the Huffington Posts of tech journalism have to sustain growth beyond their audience and crisp initial point of view, into something mushy and barely palatable.
I would like to be very wrong.
[0]: http://arstechnica.com/cars/2014/07/a-day-in-the-new-porsche...
[1]: http://arstechnica.com/cars/2014/07/hands-on-with-audis-flag...
They might not be the flashiest, highest-profile tech news site, but maybe that is part of their advantage--less clickbait and more actual reporting.
Their coverage of modern password cracking was also top-notch and, with the "correct horse battery staple" XKCD, changed the way a lot of people think about strong passwords.
Alas, that was something of a perfect storm for The Verge, and these days most of their content that isn't aggregation seems to consist of fairly vapid, Gawker-esque "thinkpieces" and "hot takes" designed only to drive readers to the comment section.
http://www.polygon.com/2015/4/6/8285529/looking-glass-histor...
http://www.polygon.com/features/2015/5/21/8627231/the-first-...
The day-to-day Polygon "news" doesn't interest me much, but their "features" have been excellent.
I understand they need more traffic but if I want film reviews I'll go to a film website I don't understand why they think their game reviews are equipped to discuss things they don't know much about.
Yeah.
To me, Re/Code and AllThingsD were not about tech, they were about money. Who has it, who just spent it, who just made it, who just lost it. The "D" in AllThingsD was to me not "digital" but "dollar."
It would be interesting to learn if the Re/Code folks got along with their owners (CNBC?) or if that was a clash, and one party wanted out.
Re/Code was a startup. They built it into a thing someone else wanted, and they sold it. That's hard work.
Congratulations and best of luck carrying the torch at Vox.
Matt Mullenweg, Automattic CEO, wrote about AllThingsD when it first launched, "All Things D is a fantastic new WordPress MU powered site that I think is a really good example of what the platform can do." http://ma.tt/2007/04/allthingsd-on-wp/
I have a friend who runs his own blog about movies, pulls about 1.5-1.7M monthly uniques. He has two writers and himself cranking on this thing. For comparison Recode apparently has 44 employees, that's REALLY expensive. I understand they have events and likely a higher opportunity for monetization with their credibility but the math simply doesn't add up no matter how you slice it on that one.
http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/26/8662905/the-verge-and-reco...
Maturing market. Is the market for meta technology news (ie: the business behind technology) that big? Will it support lots of niche news outlets?
Seems like a good move for Vox to jump on this, too.
Here's my actual data from Google Analytics over the same period: http://encosia.com/i/encosia-unique-users/