Buy Bye
ISSUE 26 [701g Per Serving]
News (Not) Just In
It’s official. Vox Media has been sold. Well, half of it has.
What do I think about that?
If I’m honest, part of me feels good about it.
On some level, it makes my own redundancy easier to reconcile. It was pretty obvious that the company was gearing up for something. Still, seeing it happen helps make sense of what, at the time, felt frustratingly difficult to get my head around.
And if I’m being completely honest, I’m not sure I would have relished another long, messy transition. Those periods always come with a ton of uncertainty and near-constant confusion.
At the same time, I feel for everyone over there, many of whom will now no doubt be preparing themselves for exactly that.
But this is the nature of the modern media beast. Everyone knows it. And there are few groups of people I’d back more strongly to get through it and thrive on the other side than my former colleagues.
That’s Not The Half Of It
Interestingly, James Murdoch didn’t want the whole shebang.
He’s buying the podcast network, Vox.com and New York Magazine.
I saw one article comparing the deal to the moment in Succession when Kendall Roy buys Vaulter, the buzzy, youth-focused digital publisher. Firstly, let’s hope not (if you remember how that worked out for Vaulter). Secondly, I’m not sure the writers had Vox Media in mind when they were crafting that particular subplot. And even if they did, times have changed.
Yes, Vox Media was one of the great new-media darlings. Part of the much-discussed and, at times, ludicrously overvalued generation of publishers that included BuzzFeed and Vice. Businesses that rode the rise of social to extraordinary scale, only to have the rug pulled from under them by those very same platforms.
But that era has been over for a while.
And I doubt what attracted Murdoch was scale at all.
It was some combination of talent, journalism and cultural cache.
I think that’s the Venn diagram you want to be inside if you’re building a modern media business.
Sure, the podcast network is super valuable. But much of that value sits with the hosts behind the shows. Figures like Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway have huge credibility and reach in their own right. The organisation gets their clout — and, not insignificantly, they get to be part of an organisation with genuine journalistic credentials.
In the same way, it-girl Tefi Pessoa brings her obsessed fanbase — who might otherwise spend their entire media diet elsewhere — to The Cut, and lands the reciprocal benefits of being associated with one of the world’s most influential titles for her trouble.
Clever Is Hot Right Now
Outside the podcast network, Vox.com and New York Magazine both have a reputation for combining thoughtful reporting and high-brow storytelling with a distinct cultural point of view.
There’s a growing appetite for intelligence in media right now. A kind of Substack-ification of the internet, where audiences increasingly crave original, rigorous thinking in a world awash with AI-generated nonsense.
I don’t know whether that’s part of the play, or whether, like his father, James just has a preference for legacy news publishers and traditional print formats.
Nonetheless, it feels like a signal pointing in that direction.
So What Now?
Well, let’s hope both businesses thrive.
For me, Vox Media was the standout success story of the new-media era. Not simply because it reached hundreds of millions of people, but because it managed to do it without abandoning the principles that made journalism valuable in the first place.
I was proud to work for a company that took its responsibility in the world seriously. One that understood what it meant to be a node in a wider information environment. One that believed in truth-seeking, accountability and editorial integrity while still making proper quality stuff along the way.
Long may that continue, on both sides of the split.
Because as the tech titans continue to tighten their vice-like grip on the media ecosytem, the Vox Medias of the world must thrive.
We’ll be worse off without them.