Reading Vox reminds me, painfully, of studying for a test.
— Matthew Kassel (@matthewkassel) April 10, 2014
i like Vox/think it’s going to be a great resource but some of it def. reads like it was written by a robot that’s trying to become sentient
— Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) April 7, 2014
A “super-excited” robot at that. A reader is somewhat bewildered by the Vox launch:
Wasn’t the whole point of Vox to use new technology to help explain the news like it was never explained before? Wasn’t data supposed to be the centerpiece of that endeavor? Yet here is Matt Yglesias, voxplaining why he and his colleagues are running screenshots of the charts they make with Datawrapper because the actual charts don’t work properly on their mobile site and they didn’t have time to fix the problem before the launch.
What is this, healthcare.gov?
Oh snap. I’m not sure if Wilkinson is being just as arch here:
Mr Klein did have the audacity to launch a new publication presumably meant to shore-up American democracy through access to better information with a lengthy meditation on the pointlessness of doing just that. That’s negative capability! Coming as it does from our nation’s capital—that dark eye of “a perfect storm for making smart people very stupid”—Mr Klein’s unexpected plunge into the bracing waters of self-doubt comes as a bright and promising sign for Vox and its audience.
Meanwhile, buried in a writeup of Vox in Ad Age:
Card stacks also represent a new ad product for Vox Media. “If there’s a card stack on Obamacare or Bitcoin, advertisers can integrate directly into those topic areas,” Mr. Bankoff said, adding that any sponsored cards would be clearly labeled as such.
Here’s hoping that Ezra and Matt and Melissa don’t succumb to enhanced advertorial techniques.
The Dish 