Vox Media Acquires New York Magazine (nytimes.com)

> “No one had to do this,” Pamela Wasserstein, the chief executive of New York Media, said on Tuesday. “It’s a brilliant, in our view, opportunity, so that’s why we leaned into it. It’s not out of need. It’s out of ambition.”

If it was such a great opportunity and not out of need, why wouldn’t they disclose the value of the sale?

> Neither company would disclose the value of the deal.

I'm going to go ahead and assume this was less of a "buy" and more of a "took on their debt in exchange for their assets" kind of situation

It'll be interesting to see where this goes. Vox Media has built up some really good brands and I'd hate to see this drag them down. Odd that they aren't folding related publications, as they're definitely going to have some competing internal publications until they do. Makes sense for the employees though, probably, to retain their own editorial style on each side of things

Both NYMag and Vox claim/seek to license their CMS to third parties to offset the sunk costs they've dumped into developing them.

NYMag's is named "Clay" and counts golf.com and radio.com as customers: https://clay.nymag.com/

Vox's is called "Chorus" and they claim to have 350 sites but they don't care to name them: https://getchorus.voxmedia.com/

Both are getting absolutely creamed in the market by WaPo's ARC: https://www.arcpublishing.com/ (and of course Wordpress)

So it stands to reason that at least one of these two CMS's is going to eat the other. Most likely Chorus eating Clay, vox's set of properties and traffic is 6-8x larger than nymag's (by comscore uniques) so its less work to keep it.

IIRC there was a recent article about how VOX was running at a loss and being propped up by certain political actors. I’ll try to find it in the morning.

It’s wild that Vox is an amateur baseball blog that mushroomed into a billion-dollar media conglomerate.

Throw back to when people were saying unionizing will kill vox.