Vox Media Acquires New York Magazine

September 25, 2019 10:36 AM

New York Magazine is effectively taking a minority stake in the privately held Vox Media Jimmy Breslin, Gloria Steinem and Tom Wolfe worked for the magazine, which has won 44 National Magazine Awards and the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in criticism.
posted by Bee'sWing (19 comments total)

As long as they don't eliminate the crossword, I am good with this. I remember going back 30+ years ago, before the internet kiddies, when the NY Magazine personals was the place to meet someone. Sort of. A certain type of someone. Their long form articles have always been a good read. Saturday Night Fever was based on one of their essays.
posted by AugustWest at 10:52 AM on September 25, 2019

As long as they don't eliminate the crossword Jerry Saltz, I am good with this.
posted by Capt. Renault at 10:59 AM on September 25, 2019

As long as they don't eliminate the crossword Jerry Saltz Heather Havrilesky, I am good with this.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 11:04 AM on September 25, 2019 [6 favorites]

As long as they don’t eliminate Chait and Sullivan, I am good with this.
posted by The Whelk at 11:16 AM on September 25, 2019 [22 favorites]

> New York Magazine is effectively taking a minority stake in the privately held Vox Media

This is kind of confusing and misleading. Vox is acquiring NYMag's parent company, not vice versa.
posted by ardgedee at 11:17 AM on September 25, 2019 [11 favorites]

I'd feel better about this if New York Magazine's employees hadn't had to hear about this first from Twitter. That's not a great place to start from a 'treating your employees professionally' perspective.
posted by Copronymus at 11:18 AM on September 25, 2019 [19 favorites]

I wonder whether Justin and Griffin McElroy have a stake in the acquisition. They're cofounders, along with a bunch of other people, of the Polygon website. They both left Polygon last year but I dunno whether that means they're simply not employed there any more of if they're fully divested.
posted by ardgedee at 11:23 AM on September 25, 2019 [1 favorite]

I am just kind of stunned that Vox (which I think of as Klein and Yglesias, who I think of as a pair of undergraduates) is big and established enough to acquire a real magazine. That makes me feel older than my youngest kid going off to college did.
posted by LizardBreath at 12:32 PM on September 25, 2019 [3 favorites]

Jimmy Breslin, Gloria Steinem and Tom Wolfe worked for the magazine, which has won 44 National Magazine Awards and the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

Over the years, NY Magazine has swerved back and forth between essential reading and shitty gossip rag, depending on the ownership and editorial regime. Rupert Murdoch was its owner for a while.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 12:44 PM on September 25, 2019 [7 favorites]

I am just kind of stunned that Vox (which I think of as Klein and Yglesias, who I think of as a pair of undergraduates) is big and established enough to acquire a real magazine. That makes me feel older than my youngest kid going off to college did.

VOX is the parent company, they run EATER, CURBED, the SBNATION network and many others. They have hundreds of millions of site visitors across all of their sites, NY MAG will be a drop in that bucket.
posted by chaz at 2:26 PM on September 25, 2019 [4 favorites]

Oh, duh. I hadn't realized there was a parent company. I am now less stunned.
posted by LizardBreath at 2:43 PM on September 25, 2019

Ygleisas started blogging in 2002. He's not a kid at this point.
posted by Chrysostom at 3:21 PM on September 25, 2019 [3 favorites]

I hope they lift the paywall.
posted by pxe2000 at 3:55 PM on September 25, 2019 [1 favorite]

Highbrow, a little despicable.
posted by babelfish at 4:33 PM on September 25, 2019 [3 favorites]

I am just kind of stunned that Vox (which I think of as Klein and Yglesias, who I think of as a pair of undergraduates) is big and established enough to acquire a real magazine. That makes me feel older than my youngest kid going off to college did.

Behind the scenes Vox has actually been doing a staggering amount of real engineering and R&D work to build tech infrastructure for profitable digital publishing that doesn't rely on a hellscape swamp of backfilled scam ads and Facebook style personal data hustling. They've recruited a really amazing team, and they treat their large slate of digital publications as a "customer base" for a digital publishing platform that's got a real engineering team behind it.

Like, not trying to fanboy or anything but it doesn't shock me at all. If any of the digital media clusters out there make it through the ongoing culling and realignment of the online content space, Vox is the one my money's on.
posted by verb at 5:15 PM on September 25, 2019 [16 favorites]

Does anyone know if Markos Moulitsas, of Daily Kos fame, still has an interest in Vox Media? Wikipedia lists him as a founder but I can't tell if he's been involved recently or not.
posted by octothorpe at 5:31 PM on September 25, 2019

Huh - they (NYMag) own Vulture and The Cut? Did everyone else already know that?
posted by atoxyl at 6:58 PM on September 25, 2019

Behind the scenes Vox has actually been doing a staggering amount of real engineering and R&D work to build tech infrastructure for profitable digital publishing that doesn't rely on a hellscape swamp of backfilled scam ads and Facebook style personal data hustling.

The CMS war between Vox Media and The Washington Post is heating up
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 7:19 PM on September 25, 2019 [5 favorites]

The CMS war between Vox Media and The Washington Post is heating up

As someone who works in this field I am honestly JAZZ HANDS levels of excitement. I do FLOSS development, and honestly a lot of stagnation in the content management/digital publishing space has been due to deep divides between product-makers and product-users. (See The Democratization of Innovation). Newsrooms and publishing companies building and iterating on these toolsets is leading to a lot of really, really amazing work.
posted by verb at 8:18 PM on September 25, 2019 [7 favorites]