I’m basically rooting for Vox to succeed but I guess I am not even doing my small part to make it happen. I have linked to them a couple of times, but I haven’t made them a regular part of my reading list. I find the interface a little hard to understand, and a lot of it really seems like “issues for dummies.” There aren’t that many things that I feel I need to have explained to me. Basically, science, economics, the law, and education policy are the main areas where I welcome “explainers” that can help me grasp complex issues. Not so for politics, however, and politics is what I mainly focus on in my writing.
In any case, I agree that it’s still too early to know whether or not Vox can be successful. I appreciate their effort, however. Anything that bets on the idea that people are smart and can be made to be well-informed is something I want to see pay off. The far easier path is to bet on the “a sucker is born every minute” mentality.
There are a lot of legitimate criticisms of Vox. But Byers offered basically none of them in favor of citing unnamed industry sources.
The Howard Kurtz style of media criticism.
I wish there was a media critic/reporter who covered hard news as good as Sports Illustrated’s Richard Deitsch does with sports.
And…..in an article about VOX you still did not link to them. Instead you linked to an article about VOX on Political.
Which is the Internet equivalent of making me walk through the bathroom to get to the kitchen.
.
Stupid autofill! Politico!
Who also don’t link to VOX. In an article about…VOX.
.
good one.
I was wondering about the link situation,
I love Vox. Their media stuff sucks, but I like having a one stop shopping spot that will actually explain WTF ebola is doing today or who the players are in the Ukrainian Separatist movement.
But because I like it, it’s probably doomed, because I’m not allowed nice things.
Court order
I also like it, although I don’t go there as much as I should.
It loads. That may seem a little ‘well of course it does!’ but there are plenty of sites, particularly new or refurbished ones, that don’t. There are LOT of crap sites, more interested in auto loads, cookies, and sticking things on your machine than actually working. Facebook comes to mind. Yahoo. Lots of others.
It’s nice to go to a site that works.
.
What’s funny is that, at least this past week or two, Vox has been getting more uniques than Drudgico(aka Politico aka Tiger Beat on the Potomac). Maybe Boo can explain what that means to us. Also, someone was claiming Vox gets a lot of hate-read from places like Twitchy and the other dregs of the right. And I pointed out on the Twitter machine that it’s all the same to GE, and whom ever owns Vox.
I follow several of the writers on Twitter, and have clicked through a couple of times. It’s interesting, though sometimes I think their vision of “explaining” a thing is so concise as to lack depth, or maybe nuance. But overall, I haven’t disagreed with what I’ve seen, and they do manage to convey good explanations of many things amazingly efficiently. I should really spend more time with their site, I’m curious to know what I think about it.;-)
As more newspapers and magazines go behind more restrictive paywalls, new media enterprises like First Look, Pando, Vox, and Medium have appeared trying to make news and cogent opinion available and offer means for the best of the younger generation of journalists and pundits the ability to support their work.
If there is to be an independent media capable of uncovering facts about events and arguing from multiple points of view instead of being reduced to two ideological or two partisan points of view, there must be experimentation with what are viable business models on the internet. Especially as the wages and salaries of potential readers continue to be constrained by the powers that be and the politicians.
Otherwise we are stuck with the over-50 crowd who shilled us into war and a center-right domestic agenda on the one hand and outright political grifters on the other.
I wish all of these new ventures the best. They are for now the best hope of ever getting sane political and economic policy again in the United States.
What I mean by “older”:
Wingnut welfare is for life.
I happen to find VOX to be one of the most “educational” sites on my daily journey through Liberal Land. I would sure like to get a peek at the Booman’s daily list.
I Happen to love visual articles, with lots of pictures and maps. Vox’s post on the crap going on in Iraq and Syria, showing the political and religious history is a great example of the Background Vox provides.
http://www.vox.com/a/maps-explain-the-middle-east
RE: ” really seems like “issues for dummies.”, it IS,
and if you have more than a dummy brain, it explains it well and succinctly, and makes you want to do more research.
Even though Booman is One, and Vox is many, I hit Booman more often in the day. VOX is research; Booman is what is happening NOW, with common sense opinion thrown in.
IMHO, you can get a whole week of Vox at once, and be
led to what has interested you during the week. I NEED my Booman multiple times a day!
I don’t like Ezra Klein and the kind of punditry he stands for, so I try to avoid Vox links whenever possible. I’m not actually rooting for it to fail, but I’m not rooting for it to succeed either.