Who is Vox Media writing for?

I really hate the current system of how articles reach us though, it's like all the newspapers have competing cornerboys with competing loudspeakers and our relative choices are determined by which is loudest or most piercing.

okay so I went back to their job pages to find more new media terribleness et voila

https://boards.greenhouse.io/voxmedia/jobs/195385?gh_jid=195385

Create Your Own Job
at Vox Media (View all jobs)
Anywhere

...
If you’re interested in working at Vox.com, we want to hear from you! If there’s a specific open position you’re interested in, please apply there. But we’d also like to build our bench, so to speak, so when there’s an opening, we have incredible people top-of-mind. And we realize you may have a better idea for our next position, or even our next section, than we do! So if you want to pitch us on a role, please submit:

it's all around you

what's wrong with that

it's kind of a half-assed wavering between the corporate "put your resume in the system in case something pops up" with some "if you can dream it, maybe you can make it!" icing put on top

let's get real, they're not going to hire a rando to write a column based on a pitch. if you're pitching a cool new idea, it's to a person, not to an inbox

and by inbox I don't mean an email inbox, I mean an online resume management system

I hate this idea of "it's up to you to define the parameters!" Like, no. You're an employer. It's one of your most basic duties to define the job you want to pay for. You're just giving job seekers more unpaid work to do coming up with the job itself.

employers are pretty bad at defining jobs imo

Often, sure, but is making job seekers do it really "better"

i'm sure anyone who gets a 'create your own job' job will not mourn the unpaid hours they spent inventing it

think the point is that most who put in the time "apply" will not get the job

to apply*

exactly. like, great for the one guy who gets the Oxford Comma Officer position or whatever, a ridiculous waste of time for everyone else, even moreso than regular job hunting

tbh though I also just really hate Vox which is making this seem extra annoying

feel like this ask is kinda "can we get somebody with a cool new idea we don't have to pay extra for and especially who we don't have to pay for the time s/he puts into developing it"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMcuRl_shGE

think the point is that most who put in the time "apply" will not get the job

― k3vin k., Tuesday, April 26, 2016 4:15 PM (34 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

so?

so, there's no idea protection there! you could send vox a pitch through this form, they could think "hmm, that's a great idea" and do the whole thing without hiring you

I mean, companies getting prospective employees to pitch ideas and then stealing them wholesale isn't a new thing, but doing it via an employment application web form is very of our times

recode.net seems to have been assimilated design-wise, but I'm not sure what it does? It seems so credulous of the industry it covers. And every other article on the front page appears to be about Uber-Didi.

every time i read something todd vanderwoof has written i gain some insight into why ppl send strangers death threats on the internet

recently considered pitching something to Vox proper

do it, we need a vox contributor

this article is a ... journey...

http://www.vox.com/2016/8/9/12385772/hamilton-broadway-musical

(the genius annotated version is great, and probably the only way to get through reading the whole thing

http://genius.it/10231128/www.vox.com/2016/8/9/12385772/hamilton-broadway-musical)

The often thousand dollar pricetag to even see Hamilton kind of prevents it from getting the backlash it deserves.

i haven't even tried to listen to the hamilton soundtrack but i fucking hate it

but you and it are woke af

feel like hamilton is what people who dont like rap music can listen to in order to be like YES I CAN SAY I LIKE IT NOW

i guess i don't understand why this happened before a popular musical was made about the life of a rapper

or just a slew of unauthorized musicals about living people.

I like the score plenty as a musical but those Genius annotations are richly deserved

is there an explainer for people who do just can't enjoy musicals

there was a big musical that came out and then it got way hyped by people who don't care about musicals and then the hype became too much so it started getting a lot of backlash from people who don't care about musicals and then the backlash started getting backlash from people who don't care about musicals (me)

feel like hamilton is what people who dont like rap music can listen to in order to be like YES I CAN SAY I LIKE IT NOW

i have never heard 'rent' straight through but i always assumed it was the same kind of deal, i remember ppl throwing the word 'punk' around when i first knew people who liked it

Oh man, I really like Hamilton and decided to give Rent a listen since people kept mentioning that as the last 'hip' musical. What a piece of crap. The first stretch is bad text being growled over the sound of guitar tuning, it's horrible. Then it becomes pure schmaltz. Worst musical ever.

if we're just talking about hamilton i feel like we're missing 2/3 of why that article is amazing. you sort of have to bear with it to see where it goes.

Schmaltz is the point.

why do ppl hate vox? anxious about the fact that i don't hate it, but i keep seeing ppl (coworkers, ilxors, friends) diss it, so i feel like i am missing something

i dunno, i am a hillary voter, so

serious answer: vox has lots of low quality writing that purports to explain things but is just rehashing wikipedia and it has bad editorial control. the article illustrates the latter.

what article? *scrolls up* the hamilton one?

yeah. on the other count see http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/46-times-vox-totally-fucked-up-a-story-1673835447

(i think they've gotten slightly better since but...)

its the buzzfeed model, but with "syria facts" in place of "cat gifs"

ok, so the van der werff piece seems...bad.

i don't have a problem with "syria facts," tho.

cock

that deadspin article is 100% of my experience with actual vox articles. they're as well researched as any bottom of the barrel clickbait sites but they have a professional logo and ezra klein or whatever.

I wonder if the phenomenally incoherent nature of the Vox Media properties is just the inevitable result of trying to force "smart" bloggers to write what essentially amounts to clickbait, with editorial QC to meet the standards of the latter. The null hypothesis is that this is not the case, and maybe I am just an old dad who doesn't get the Internet any more.

The majority of content on the flagship seems to be aimed at fourth and fifth graders; the mundane phenomena and news stories they "explain" frequently make it transparent that they have hard quotas to hit and the editors will let just about anything qualify as a post as long as it adheres to house style. I'm not exaggerating; it genuinely reminds me of the news digest magazines we would get to read and discuss once a week in the closing years of elementary school.

https://mobile.twitter.com/fivek/status/778246489910816769

Can think of a couple of examples...

I suppose there might have been a "in the post-war era" qualifier that got lost in editing? there's still Francoist Spain and the Estado Novo in Portugal, but they both "took" power before the war I guess.

I guess some people would see the establishment of the fifth republic in 1958 as being an example of the far right taking power?

there's some very decent journalism buried in here, but the subheads drove me insane. This conversational, occasionally sarcastic, trying-to-be-funny style might be tolerable in small doses, but seeing one after the other just piled up like this feels like drinking a bottle of corn syrup.

http://www.theverge.com/a/2016-best-of-verge

A common criminal was convinced the US government used a secret device to track him down. He spent months prison trying to prove it. Turns out, he was right.
The house bet big on Tesla – did it win?
West Virginia: wild, wonderful, and hiding a vision for the future of public transportation.
New York's Penn Station has been called "the worst place in the world" and that's probably an understatement. Time for an update.
Sure, you can make an app for that — but no one wants to pay for it.
Google's DeepMind took on Go champion Lee Se-dol, and humanity lost.
Too many dudes have colonized the final frontier.
Why yes, we would like to come spend some quality time with FLOTUS.
$15,000 seems like a reasonable amount to pay for a model lightsaber.
What stays and what goes on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter? And who decides?
He wasn't feeling well. So he scrubbed his body with bleach and ate feces pills.
The cost of calling home from prison can feel like highway robbery.
We lived to tell the tale. His business plan didn't.
The App Store changed how we used our phones. Now it's time to change the App Store.
Losing weight now means pumping food out of your stomach with a tube.
Cars of the future might decide who lives, and who dies.
Hiring spies to investigate your foes doesn't make you look guilty at all.
Real talk: this pilot is no longer a pilot.
It's so nice to meet you. Now pay me.
From Brooklyn to Bangkok, the conquest of Edison bulbs, refurbished wood, and minimal design.
A lot of nature documentaries are closer to fiction than fact. And that's what makes them so addicting.
In a world of cheap computer tricks, puppets still rule.
Forget a new bus line, communities across the country are turning to Uber for all their public transportation needs.
The day they killed jack.
Step away from your Kava drink.
What if you could talk to the dead in a chat box?
Facebook said it was unaware of a program that tracked the location of its users. But we caught Facebook using the program to catch an intruder in Mark Zuckerberg's office.
Uncovering sexual harrassment and misconduct, at one of the nations's most prestigious academic organizations.
The thin polyurethane line.
You know we're on the brink of the apocalypse when the beaches have run out of sand.
For too many, social media has become a space for abuse. How do we transform it into a space of activism?
We need to talk about Casey Affleck.
Surprise: disruption and mental health care just don't mix.

Suggest Ban Nation?

it is boggling to me that there is still any audience for the verge or re/code since they are both terrible, overly earnest tech / nerd verticals that cover almost nothing that their competition doesn't, and the UX is still shit whether you're on mobile or desktop, etc etc.

I guess I still keep loading the verge in a tab from time to time because I hope one day it will improve despite knowing that the vox media house style is always going to grate and only 1 out of 40 times am I going to see anything I'm remotely interested in actually reading. It would be nice to see the whole farm pivot away from being so fucking watery and ditch the pretentiously neutered prose, but that seems highly unlikely. If it ain't broke don't fix it, I guess.

went back to the verge again, they're asking what people would want in a membership / premium version (?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!!?!?!?!?!??!??!!?!!?!?) and they couldn't even cover the new Star Wars trailer properly. Also, hilariously, almost none of the ads loaded in Safari on mobile. everybody loses!

The entire Vox Media enterprise makes it crystal clear that the only thing that matters is how easy it is to buy and sell ads while keeping overhead (i.e. staff writer wages) as "reasonable" as possible. Whether or not I, consumer, click on the ads clearly has no bearing on the system; whether the content is remotely interesting to anyone is the most trivial concern. It's like the iMDB model exported to news verticals. If anybody who actually understands this shit first hand would care to educate me as to why I'm wrong I'd love to learn.