• Vox co-founder Ezra Klein and editor-in-chief Lauren Williams are leaving the news site, announced Melissa Bell, publisher of Vox Media, on Friday. The news comes just a week after another co-founder, Matthew Yglesias, announced his departure, citing a desire to reclaim “an independent voice.”.
• Vox Media co-founder Ezra Klein and the Vox.com editor in chief Lauren Williams are both leaving the company, the latest digital news pioneers to jump ship as their startups struggle amid the.
• Vox is an American news website owned by Vox Media.The website was founded in April 2014 by Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, and Melissa Bell, and is noted for its concept of explanatory journalism. Vox's media presence also includes a YouTube channel, several podcasts, and a show presented on Netflix.Vox has been described as left-of-center and progressive.

Ezra Klein, Melissa Bell, Matthew Yglesias and Trei Brundrett announce the launch of the news site Vox.comSubscribe to our channel! The latest tweets from @ezraklein.

The co-founder of the digital-news site Vox will leave the organization and join the New York Times, in another sign of upheaval among start-up companies that have sought to challenge “legacy” news operations.

Ezra Klein, who rose to prominence as a policy blogger, including at The Washington Post, will become a columnist and podcast host at the Times, he said on Friday. Vox’s editor in chief, Lauren Williams, is also leaving the company and plans to start a nonprofit news organization aimed at Black communities.

Klein, 36, left The Post in 2014 to start Vox with two colleagues, Melissa Bell and Matthew Yglesias. The site — which publishes analytical reported articles explaining everything from Boeing’s issues with its 737 Max jet to Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian connections — is part of a constellation of specialized news-and-commentary sites owned by Vox Media, including SB Nation (sports), Curbed (real estate) and Eater (food). Vox is based in Washington and New York.

Despite multimillion-dollar investments from Wall Street firms and traditional media companies, many of the top names in digital media have struggled to realize the profits once imagined from the epochal transition from traditional print and broadcast media to the online kind. This has led to layoffs, waning of capital investment and a broad industry retrenchment.

Fierce competition for advertising and subscriber dollars, high overhead and more recently the pandemic have made it difficult to reap large returns. Many of the leading digital news sites have failed to return any profit, some after more than a decade in operation.

On Wednesday, two of the most popular and promising upstarts of yore, HuffPost (formerly the Huffington Post) and BuzzFeed agreed to a financial transaction in which BuzzFeed will acquire its rival and share content with HuffPost’s parent, Verizon Media. The purchase will be made primarily through an exchange of stock, an indication that cash — once the common currency for such deals — has become less available for such deals.

The agreement was another in a series of consolidation moves among online news purveyors, all aimed at creating larger, more competitive conglomerates.

Vox Media kicked off the merger wave in September 2019 when it announced plans to acquire New York Media, publisher of New York magazine. Vice Media, the millennial-focused digital media company, announced plans a month later to buy Refinery29, which targets young women. That same month, Group Nine Media, which itself is a conglomeration of once-independent digital media brands, bought the entertainment site PopSugar.

Klein and Williams are the second and third senior leaders at Vox to walk away from the site in the past week; co-founder Yglesias announced he was leaving to start his own newsletter last week.

“Vox was built on a kind of analytic concept that was [Klein’s] originally,” said Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of the New York Times who wrote a book contrasting traditional media outlets such as the New York Times and The Post with younger digital upstarts such as Vice and BuzzFeed. “He took the explainer to a high art.”

The exodus of personalities back to traditional outlets “is sad, because all of these news media outlets we used to call upstarts are really dependent on digital advertising, and it’s the kiss of death,” Abramson added.

She described the recent wave of mergers as “marriages of weakness,” not strength. And the departure of editorial stars from those enterprises is not good for the profession. “Those journalists and outlets are doing original quality stuff that was healthy for our profession — and it’s not healthy for every single one of those highly-talented digital journalists to be at the [New York] Times.”

Other digital news stars have beaten a similar path, in some cases back to jobs at mainstream outlets. Buzzfeed’s editor, Ben Smith, left the publication earlier this year to join the Times as a media columnist. HuffPost’s editor, Lydia Polgreen, departed the site in March, joining a podcast company. Kara Swisher, another former Washington Post journalist who co-founded the technology site Recode (now owned by Vox Media), became a Times contributing writer and podcast host. And Glenn Greenwald, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist who co-founded the Intercept, said he was quitting last month to start a newsletter.

Ezra Cox Iii

Jim Bankoff, CEO of Vox Media, credited Klein and Williams with building Vox “into the powerhouse that it is today” in a statement and added that it “has long since grown beyond being dependent on any individuals. It’s a talented team of 100s of people who contribute each day to its success.”

“I’m extraordinarily grateful to Ezra and Lauren for helping to build the Vox property of Vox Media into the powerhouse that it is today. Vox is a leader not only on the web but in podcasts, in TV shows, and it has the largest YouTube channel in the news category. Ezra and Lauren know better than anyone that Vox has long since grown beyond being dependent on any individuals. It’s a talented team of 100s of people who contribute each day to its success. And we wish them both the best going forward and we’re excited to evolve and grow and build Vox into something even more special in the years ahead.”

In announcing Klein’s hiring on Friday, the Times said he “helped set the standard for modern explanatory journalism early in his career, and he’s been able to do it through virtually every medium.”

Jeremy Barr contributed to this report.

These media sources are moderately to strongly biased toward liberal causes through story selection and/or political affiliation. They may utilize strong loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by using appeal to emotion or stereotypes), publish misleading reports and omit reporting of information that may damage liberal causes. Some sources in this category may be untrustworthy. See all Left Bias sources.

• Overall, we rate Vox Left Biased due to wording and story selection that routinely favors the left. We also rate them Mostly Factual in reporting, rather than High, due to two failed fact checks, with only one offering a correction.

Detailed Report

Bias Rating: LEFT
Factual Reporting: MOSTLY FACTUAL
Country: USA (45/180 Press Freedom)
Media Type: Website
Traffic/Popularity: High Traffic
MBFC Credibility Rating: HIGH CREDIBILITY

Ezra Box

History

Ezra Vogel

Founded in 2014, Vox is a news hub run by Vox Media (Not to be confused with Vox German TV channel). Co-founded by former Washington PostcolumnistEzra Klein who is also an editor. Melissa Bell is the vice president of growth and analytics, and former Slate Columnist Matthew Yglesias is editor and a columnist for Vox.

Funded by / Ownership

Vox Media is owned by Vox Media, a digital publishing network founded by Jerome Armstrong, Tyler Bleszinski, and Markos Moulitsas and based in Washington, D.C. According to a Nieman Lab article,Vox Media has eight editorial brands and a custom advertising division. These are (sports-focused) SB Nation, (tech site) The Verge, (video game site) Polygon, (real estate blog) Curbed, (food and nightlife) Eater, (technology news) Racked, (news hub) Vox and (technology business) Recode. Further, a New York Times article dated 2015 states that NBC Universal, which Comcast owns, invested $200 Million in Vox Media.

Analysis / Bias

According to a Politico interviewwith the editor, Ezra Klein, Klein describes their goal as “to use technology to improve readers’ experience and understanding of events.” Vox has introduced Vox Card Stacks, and with those cards, theyorganize information, in index card format, about all kinds of topics in the news with in-depth details but in a summary form. Some examples are:“Everything you need to know about Israel-Palestine” and “The spread of marijuana legalization, explained.” Vox also has a feature called StoryStream, where they provide real-time updates to news stories.

In review, Vox looks at the issues from a progressive liberal perspective, and there is also an anti-Trump tone in their reporting. Therefore, the majority of stories are pro-left and anti-right. Further, Vox publishes stories with emotionally loaded headlines such as “Are Democrats brave enough to run a woman against Donald Trump?” and “The most depressing energy chart of the year- Coal has got to go” When it comes to sourcing, Vox typically utilizes credible sources such as the NY Times,Associated Press, and Bloomberg.

Failed Fact Checks

Vox Ezra Klein Podcast

• DID 200,000 SALVADORANS WITH TEMPORARY PROTECTED STATUS FLEE NATURAL DISASTER? – FALSE (correction issued)
• Did wages fall by 1.8 percent after Donald Trump’s tax cut? – MOSTLY FALSE

Ezra Box

Overall, we rate Vox Left Biased due to wording and story selection that routinely favors the left. We also rate them Mostly Factual in reporting, rather than High, due to two failed fact checks, with only one offering a correction. (5/15/2016) Updated (M. Huitsing 03/10/2021)

Source: https://www.vox.com/

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