Abstract
In January this year the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein left for undeclared pastures. Three months later he announced Vox (vox.com): a digital magazine with a twist that promises not merely to report and analyse the news but to explain it too. This is a site that promises to make the reader feel cleverer: “Understand the news …” “Explained in 2 minutes …”
The format works by peppering features with hyperlinks to “card stacks” – sometimes quite lengthy slideshows of cards explaining a particular topic. For example, the “Obamacare” slideshow, - attached to the “Outside Washington, Obamacare Doesn't Exist” feature – is 28 cards long and covers the basics and modern controversies. For this fact-heavy approach to journalism, Vox has been likened to a Wikipedia run by journalists – and not especially flatteringly.
Klein admits the site is still a “work-in-progress”. He says the reasons for a quick launch were that he could have spent “three months to 30 months” on it, and it wouldn't have been perfect. Despite this hasty launch, the site is polished, if a little bare and underdeveloped.
It looks, in the end, like any other digital features magazine except with the additional novelty of “explainers” to explain potentially difficult parts of its articles. Critics have said hyperlinks and explaining articles have been around for a while, like the “Quicktake” series at Bloomberg. Plus they ask the withering question: do we need an entire website for this, what's wrong with hyperlinking to a Wikipedia article?
These are the questions Klein has to find answers to. Vox is more attractive and more reader-friendly than Wikipedia. That it is written by journalists rather than crowd-sourced like Wikipedia may be a blessing and a curse. Wikipedia represents a collaboration between any number of people but is inundated with inaccurate information – while also sourcing unimaginable quantities of pertinent and often rare pieces. How can Vox afford to pay journalists to replicate this level of voluntary reporting?
These are early days, and Klein has already reported “millions” of views on some articles, possibly because Vox has benefited from the hype surrounding its launch. “Millions” will mean nothing if it doesn't translate into loyal subscribers. Klein remains confident that Vox meets the needs of online readers, but hasn't showed evidence for his claims about a public desire for someone to explain the news. Or even how his stacks are the solution to the problem of political and economic apathy among younger generations.
We might imagine a future in which Vox earns money by syndicating its card stacks to other sites. In this scenario, Vox abandons its feature-writing to become a service that repurposes Wikipedia articles into dynamic, popular pieces. These articles could then be rented to a website or paid for on a per-article basis, with each article containing a hyperlink to a stack. It is not the most innovative idea, but could provide a practical solution to a problem.
The danger is that Vox – about which such great things were promised at launch – looks more like a vanity project for Klein than an innovative media platform. He has certainly not received much praise from other journalists. The Guardian accused him of propagating a white man's “clubhouse” with other prominent journalists.
The more problematic question is whether Vox is a real innovation. The New York Times has launched The Upshot (www.nytimes.com/upshot/), which also promises “explanatory journalism”. The journalist Nate Silver is behind FiveThirtyEight (fivethirtyeight.com), which sets out to use “statistical analysis – hard numbers – to tell compelling stories about politics, science …” Scores of magazines already write features covering every imaginable niche in politics, business and culture – what is the new thing the Vox voice brings to the debate? Klein says criticism is “mockery”. In an interview with The New York Times, he said he was “ecstatic for that kind of mockery” and that the Vox niche of explanatory journalism was effectively competitor-free (somehow at once dismissing and forgetting Wikipedia).
So do we need his site? Does it explain the news to us? Is this the way for media?
We worry that there aren't enough readers out there. We will have to see whether reader apathy can be countered with “card stacks” and good intentions.