Refreshing The Verge: no platform like home

2016-10-21T14:00:03-04:00

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.

— Nilay

In writing a new mission statement for The Verge, Nilay notes that the core difference in media between today and five years ago is the preponderance of platforms: we are no longer building a single platform where our audience will find us, but must instead populate content across many platforms, each with their own unique proclivities. That doesn’t mean that The Verge’s website no longer matters, it means it’s now only one among many platforms that we have to attend to.

With Google AMP among the fastest growing of those platforms, Nilay is understandably skeptical about the open web’s future. I’m sympathetic to that — and as the one leading a redesign of the publishing tools on Vox Media’s platform, Chorus, I have to make publishing to AMP and other platforms one of my highest priorities. But I also believe that The Verge (and indeed all of Vox Media’s brands, as well as many other publishers) will find opportunities to experiment on the open web such that it remains a compelling component of the overall platform ecosystem.

Our website is where we have the biggest opportunity to develop new ways of telling stories, independent of the constraints of other platforms. So while it’s very likely that many members of our audience will find that the primary way they read or watch The Verge is via Google AMP or Facebook video, our own platform will inform those experiences, and will continue to be core to everything we do.

our stories have to be resilient

What does that mean for a publishing platform like Chorus? To start, our stories have to be resilient. A single story may present one way on our own site, another way in the AMP version, and yet other ways in a Facebook Instant Article or on Apple News. Each of these platforms has a lot in common as far as basic storytelling components go, but they also diverge in non-trivial ways: interactions, typographical systems, the presentation and behavior of ads, and the elements we have to play with to express our brand’s identities may all differ from platform to platform.

Perhaps ironically, we’ve found that the best way to create that resiliency is by harking back to the web principle of progressive enhancement: each story created in Chorus begins as a platform-neutral collection of text, images, and video. That foundation ensures that we can publish that story as easily to our own platform as to, say, AMP or Apple News, and be confident that our audience will experience that story in a way that fits whichever platform they are using. On our own platform, we’re then free to enhance up, adding stylistic or experiential flairs that elevate the experience of the story. This practice — which I refer to unoriginally as progressively enhanced storytelling — also has the added benefit of helping us make our content more accessible to more kinds of users, especially those with disabilities. (It wouldn’t be inaccurate to consider speaking browsers one among the many platforms we must publish to.)

There’s another core change in media over the past five years, which Nilay has also noted: our audience is spending as much time watching content as reading it, if not more. The explosive growth of Facebook video has many in the news business sobbing over the death of text, but I am again unconvinced: I think video growth is expanding the ways we can reach our audience, not cannibalizing time spent reading. Words will always have the benefit of speed, both in terms of time spent composing and time spent reading. That said, we still produce an order of magnitude more text content than video, and it’s past time for video to do some catching up.

we have to remix stories instead of enhancing them

In addition to prioritizing tools for video creators alongside other editorial needs in the months ahead, we’re also facing a shift in how we think of content creation overall. We can progressively enhance stories for platforms like AMP and Instant Articles which take as their core assumption something shaped more or less like an “article.” But that breaks down for Facebook video, Instagram, Snapchat, or any number of other platforms. Even video has many different outlets: what makes a Facebook video successful is different from what makes a good YouTube video or an especially shareable Vine. Here we need a different tactic: we have to remix stories instead of enhancing them, expressing a common message across different media while reusing words, images, video, and brand elements in both coherent and delightful ways. This means a new set of tools and mental models and best practices not only for composing and distributing content, but also for reusing it and reimagining it into different forms. That makes the work of publishing more complex, more generative, and more exciting.

And yet it still needs to be fast. The speed of publishing is like one of those famed startup growth charts — a hockey stick shape showing a rapid, even exponential, increase. As The Verge relaunches, we’re also about to take a newly redesigned and refactored Chorus publishing tool out of beta. That beta has many new features to support the new universe of platforms: version control, simultaneous editing, an entirely new data model, platform-agnostic design tools, and more. But our biggest challenge in the months ahead is to simultaneously empower our editorial teams to create more content, across more platforms, without slowing down or losing any of the verve and personality that have made The Verge (and our other editorial brands) so popular. As the platform ecosystem becomes more complex, Chorus has to be simultaneously more expressive and easier for our teams to use. (In case it’s not already clear, this is a huge fucking challenge, and I love my job.)

More platforms means more places to reach our community

And there’s yet another big shift underway, one which we are still evolving to address: that of community in a multi-platform, multi-device world. A site on Chorus is actually referred to as a “community,” and collections of communities are known as “networks.” That was intentional, and reflects core beliefs going back to the early days of SB Nation and The Verge about how a brand (née publisher) was expected to operate. We weren’t — we aren’t — designing systems where an audience passively consumes our content, but are inviting them in to talk and share and push back and expand. More platforms means more places to publish; it also means more places to reach that community, more places for those discussions to happen, more opportunities for amazing connections to be made. And, alas, many more vectors for abuse.

Neither The Verge nor Vox Media generally are the only ones facing this problem, of course, but given that our own platform’s foundation takes community as a critical ingredient, we have an obligation to face it head-on. Even more importantly, the very concept of “community” has changed dramatically in recent years, both with the arrival of significant numbers of orchestrated and persistent harassment campaigns across every platform, and with a seemingly unending election cycle that has made public expressions of white supremacy and misogyny commonplace. This, maybe more than anything, is why our own platform remains so important to what we do: it’s where we have the biggest opportunity to really connect with our audience, to build relationships that go deeper than likes, and to cultivate a space where more people can safely talk about the news or tech or sports.

As we continue to evolve Chorus, no other challenge we face is harder than this one. But then no other challenge is more important either.

Byron the bulb: how the velocity of journalism is changing

2014-08-18T12:58:17-04:00

As part of Verge Hack Week, we’ve invited great minds from around Vox Media to contribute their thoughts on the future of everything — from food to fashion to the written word. In this installment, we welcome senior product manager Mandy Brown, co-founder of Editorially, which joined the Vox team earlier this year.

In Thomas Pynchon’s famous and famously unreadable 1973 novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, a short story about a sentient and immortal light bulb named Byron includes a moment when a technician is sent out to test Byron for irregularities. Wearing seven-inch spiked heels in order to extend her reach, she gently unscrews Byron from the sconce he’s plugged into. At that moment, a hush goes out across the electrical grid, as every bulb everywhere “at something close to the speed of light,” knows what has happened.

Information traveling at the speed of light was largely fantastical in the time period in which the novel is set, though it’s commonplace today. But as fast as we can distribute information, we are still figuring out how to learn from it at anything close to the speeds at which it can be conveyed.

We can create and share information at speeds much faster than we can comprehend it

The past week’s events in Ferguson hint at this: thousands of tweets a minute were shared from people on the ground and elsewhere, many conflicting with each other, reflecting entwined and complicated perspectives. Some information was false — both intentionally so and otherwise — but once distributed it bounced and careened across the network, often two steps ahead of any retraction. We can create and share information at speeds much faster than we can comprehend it.

The future — of news, of storytelling, of knowing — has to, in some way, address this. The methods by which we filter and evaluate and accumulate information need to be transparent and readily interrogated. Not because openness is a panacea — it isn’t — but because knowing something is an iterative process which depends upon collaboration, and collaboration can’t happen in a dark room.

Stories have traditionally been presented as final, fixed things. The paper that prints a story on the front page doesn’t share the rough drafts, the corrections, the anxious notes to self, the agonizing over word choices (“should we call this person a ‘looter’ or a ‘protestor’?”) that are part of that story coming together. Only if a change is deemed important enough, and only if it’s decided upon after going to press, is any revision shared or explained. But we’re long past the point where stories are published once (and only once), at only one time. Who’s to say the revisions that happen after a certain point are any more important than the ones that came before? Who’s to say that all of the decisions that went into that story aren’t part of the story itself?

Why does a Wikipedia post reveal more about its creation than a story from the New York Times?

A better future would open the comments writers and editors make with one another, and invite readers in

The basic tools are already here: version control and comments. But the former are oriented inward (and rarely, if ever, shared) and the latter are relegated to the pews: comments are for outsiders to make, and for writers and editors to defend. A better future would open the comments writers and editors make with one another, and invite readers in. (Here I’ll add that my work at Editorially — and, now, Vox Media — has centered around laying the groundwork for this kind of open collaboration and experimentation.)

Byron’s compatriots could only know one thing — that he was gone. Beyond that they were ignorant. We have an obligation to know considerably more about what’s going on in the world, and we have the tools to participate in that knowledge coming together. What we don’t have is a framework for seeing how disparate bits of information are gathered together into something more — for a way to share not only the story, but the mechanics of it. Yet.

Mandy Brown | The Verge

Refreshing The Verge: no platform like home

Byron the bulb: how the velocity of journalism is changing