Refreshing The Verge

The Verge turns five on November 1st, and we’re in the process of refreshing our entire brand for the next five years. In Refreshing The Verge, we’ll be looking at how that refresh process works, and what it’s like to adapt a brand like The Verge to a world where media platforms have become dominant.

In the five years since we launched The Verge, a lot of things have changed about our brand and the media industry it operates in: our mission has expanded to cover science, culture, and transportation, our ambitions in video have gone from a sideline to the most important driver of growth, and we’ve moved from a single all-powerful desktop web experience to a distributed model that finds our audiences on a wide variety of mobile platforms. Things are getting pretty complicated around here.

The Verge turns five on November 1st, and we’re in the process of refreshing our entire brand for the next five years. In Refreshing The Verge, we’ll be looking at how that refresh process works, and what it’s like to adapt a brand like The Verge to a world where media platforms have become dominant.

One of the biggest advantages The Verge has always had is Vox Media’s own proprietary publishing platform, Chorus. As we think about building The Verge for a future where other media platforms command more and more of our audience’s attention, the needs and demands of Chorus have also changed — what started as an efficient tool for writing articles and publishing a website now needs to become a system for creating a wide range of formats and managing distribution to multiple platforms. In this installment, I’ve asked Mandy Brown, Vox Media’s Director of Publishing, to talk about the future of our platform — and really, the future of publishing tech.

The Verge turns five on November 1st, and we’re in the process of refreshing our entire brand for the next five years. In Refreshing The Verge, we’ll be looking at how that refresh process works, and what it’s like to adapt a brand like The Verge to a world where media platforms have become dominant.

When we launched The Verge in 2011, our founding team was a very small group of people who’d worked together for a long time, joining a company called SB Nation that had around 80 employees who’d also worked together for a long time. It was very easy for decisions to filter out to the entire Verge team, and it wasn’t all that difficult to communicate with the entire company when necessary. So our mission statement at the time we launched was very simple — I don’t even know who wrote it, or when:

The Verge turns five on November 1st, and we’re in the process of refreshing our entire brand for the next five years. In Refreshing The Verge, we’ll be looking at how that refresh process works, and what it’s like to adapt a brand like The Verge to a world where media platforms have become dominant.

One of the best things about The Verge is that our audience actually knows and loves so many of the people that work here — our staffers have big voices and strong opinions, and they’re out in front talking directly to readers and viewers all the time.