(2022-12-15) The Forlorn Hope That Was Voxcom Briefly Noted

Brad DeLong: The Forlorn Hope That Was Vox.com, & BRIEFLY NOTED. Matt Yglesias: What I learned co-founding Vox: ‘The current Vox management team or editorial staff… are doing a good job executing a reasonable strategy—it’s just not the strategy we set off with

There was and is an audience for the kind of broad explanatory journalism we wanted to do, there weren’t customers for it..... Vox’s readers weren’t customers; Vox was an ad sales business…. To get a really big web audience, you need broad distribution from Facebook and Google.... That meant… serv[ing] the needs of advertisers… the needs of the platforms.

Most of the media trends [people] deplore are direct consequences of Facebook’s influence over journalism in the mid-2010s...

if your model of decision making doesn’t foreground the basic business model issues, you’re misjudging the situation…

As you all know perhaps too well, I am the audience for "explainer journalism"

Matt’s story is of a vox.com setting out to fight the good fight and tilt at the windmills, but winding up being ground very fine betwee n the millstones of the New York Times, Facebook, and Google. To these I would add a fourth—the tech funding structure

I think: there is also a world in which Vox launches as a somewhat more robust version of Wonkblog, a policy-oriented alternative to politics-first D.C. publications, and is a smashing albeit niche success. (Who would have invested?)