Media

Update: The paywall has launched. Via Semafor:

Editor-in-chief Nilay Patel told Semafor that the move was intended to drive additional revenue and insulate The Verge from changes made by social media platforms[...]

“I think it’s a tragedy that garbage is free and news is behind paywalls. I don’t want to make that worse,” Patel said. “I think that The Verge homepage and our news coverage serves a central utility function in our ecosystem.”

The website also hints at future integrations with ActivityPub and Bluesky in an effort to take the focus away from SEO and social-media traffic and make The Verge homepage a platform of its own.

Early benefits include unlimited access to posts, such as paywalled newsletters and metered product reviews and features, limited ads on all Verge content and a physical limited edition magazine. Also the original decentralised solution, RSS, is available to subscribers, with unabridged posts available through RSS readers.

Original post:

According to Semafor, Vox Media's technology website The Verge is going behind a paywall. Some content will remain free:

Beginning this week, the Verge will charge $7/month or $50/year for comprehensive access to the site as well as the already-paywalled newsletters Command Line and Notepad.

Some content and the publication’s homepage, which was redesigned in 2022 to resemble a social feed, will remain free. The Verge is Vox Media’s third major subscription push behind New York and Vox, which launched a membership program earlier this year.

Everything old is new again at Vox Media, which will also be introducing an app for its publication New York Magazine, focused on digital NY Mag subscribers:

It will be the magazine’s second crack at a mobile app; New York first launched an iPhone app in 2016. 

A little over a month ago, ABC youth brand triple j relaunched at its One Night Stand music festival. And it was a pretty big rebrand, touching the logo, typeface and general audio style of the station. A pretty big change is the new "J" audio sting that plays often on the station.

Gloss Australia reached out to the ABC for more details on the sonic rebrand, but didn't hear back. On the visual side of things, Howatson+Company, partnering with the ABC, has more info on the visual changes:

Since 1975, national broadcaster triple j has served as a lighthouse for young Australians, actively pushing culture forward and challenging norms through its disruptive programming, shows and events. Yet for the last 15 years, the brand and logo have remained static. To address this, triple j has partnered with Howatson+Company to reinvigorate the brand for today’s listeners.

To make it, a custom variable typeface was designed that changes based on audio and musical inputs. The type was taught to respond to music and sound using algorithmic machine learning, creating a reactive design.

The brand’s most iconic element, the drum, was also updated to reflect the tastes of the station’s youth audience today, featuring a simplified base designed to reference digital soundbars and incorporate a hidden ‘j’.

The rebrand successfully refreshes triple j’s visual world while preserving its core identity as a champion of youth culture and new Australian music.

From Oliver Darcy's media newsletter Status:

As part of the effort, the Jim Bankoff-led digital media conglomerate — which houses widely recognizable brands such as New York magazine, Eater, Vox, SBNation, NowThis, Thrillist, and more — has started exploring the introduction of a pay wall on its popular technology website, The Verge, people familiar with the matter told me.

As Darcy also writes, The Verge has already experimented with some paid newsletters, which are published to The Verge as articles that require a subscription. This new offering could be a bundle and include additional bonus content.

This would fit with previous efforts to bring the focus of The Verge back to its homepage as a central way of accessing its content, as opposed to relying on social media links and SEO for traffic. From 2023:

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“This migration rests on Vox Media’s front-end platform, Duet — first seen on The Verge, and then Vox.com — coupled with a new, more flexible backend in WordPress VIP,” says Polygon publisher Chris Grant. “Beyond just a redesign, this new site represents a fundamental shift in our product strategy, and our continued investment and confidence in websites and loyal audiences.”

Powered by its migration to WordPress VIP and Vox Media’s front end platform, Duet, Polygon will continue to build out its homepage and website, with new community tools aimed at boosting user experience to follow the redesign.

Polygon Unveils Redesign Aimed at Making Its Homepage a Destination for Gaming Culture Consumers

Powered by its migration to WordPress VIP and Vox Media’s front-end platform, Duet, Polygon’s new homepage will unveil new editorial rubrics, with recommendations curated by staff and special guests.

Vox MediaVox Media

“I shoot politics for a living, man. Every single photo I take people are going to argue about,” Vucci said with a laugh. “I spend my life around a very highly polarized part of our society, so no matter what I do, people are gonna hate it. People are gonna love it. Listen, as long as everyone hates me equally, I’m doing the job.”

AP Photographer Spills on Viral Trump Rally Shooting Pic

Evan Vucci told The Daily Beast how he managed to capture one of the most compelling images from the shocking event.

The Daily BeastTrumpland

John Gruber, noted Apple access journalist, is back defending the company after its launch of Applebot-powered Apple Intelligence. There's some interesting treatment of Apple Intelligence and more specifically Applebot crawling the 'public web' and then 'transforming' that crawled content, via this post from Louie Mantia:

From John Gruber today:

It’s fair for public data to be excluded on an opt-out basis, rather than included on an opt-in one [...]

No, no it’s not. This is a critical thing about ownership and copyright in the world. We own what we make the moment we make it. Publishing text or images on the web does not make it fair game to train AI on. The “public” in “public web” means free to access; it does not mean it's free to use.

The idea that being on the public web means that content can be actually taken and recreated with no human contribution is bizarre. If a music video is published on YouTube, does that suddenly mean it is no longer a Copyrighted piece of work? Absolutely not. Does a paywall on a site, like Netflix for example, suddenly mean that the content is different? No.

It's insulting that Apple now claims its crawler is opt-out, after already training its AI on content without warning.

I guess Gloss republishing a quote from Mantia's blog above is also a recreation, maybe some might even say theft or copyright infringement. But I'm adding to it, linking back, and the original article is still its own viable piece. You might want to read the rest, in which case the original creator can receive pageviews.

Training AI

Keleops publishes four consumer tech websites: Journal du Geek, 01net, Presse Citron and iPhon. Jean-Guillaume Kleis, the chief executive of Keleops, said in an interview on Tuesday that the company had been looking to make an acquisition in the United States for several years and Gizmodo was “an obvious choice.”

G/O Media, owned by private equity firm Great Hill Partners and comprised of former Gawker Media titles, doesn't actually own its namesake publications anymore. The O stood for Onion and the G stood for Gizmodo.

Over the past 4 years the firm has sold ClickHole to Cards Against Humanity, Lifehacker to Ziff Davis, Jezebel, The A.V. Club and Splinter News to Paste, Deadspin to Lineup Publishing, The Takeout to Static Media and The Onion to Global Tetrahedron. All that remains is:

business news site Quartz, African-American culture outlet The Root, gaming site Kotaku, gearhead publication Jalopnik, and commerce site The Inventory.

Nice post from Thomas Stang, Engineering Lead at Vox Media, on the transition from Vox Media's Chorus CMS to Wordpress. Some interesting tidbits:

The Journey from The Verge to Vox.com

In September of 2022, The Verge launched an ambitious new site. Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel introduced the site in a post that highlighted its complete redesign and innovative homepage featuring the storystream news feed.

Thomas Stang

Over the following months, shifts and changes in our teams made the task of migration ahead of us even more challenging, as we lost some exceptional teammates and institutional knowledge. Despite these setbacks, we began planning the migration. Duet would remain the front-end platform, supporting all brand sites migrating to WordPress using a decoupled architecture. This required refactoring Duet to source data from a completely different API.

Though Polygon was nearing completion, we decided to migrate Vox News as the first brand on WordPress. Vox had the least brand-specific CMS features, making it a strategic starting point. By migrating Vox first, we could develop the majority of the features used by Chorus brands, adding new functionality with each subsequent migration.

I honestly can’t imagine the migration process going any smoother than it did. In just seven months, we built an extensive feature set into WordPress, migrated all of Vox’s content and media library, implemented a comprehensive GraphQL API, completed development of our component library, refactored the front-end platform to use a new schema and API, and launched a new, redesigned brand site.

The redesign takes a lot of cues from The Verge's 2022 redesign, excluding the introduction of 'Quick Posts'. Verge Editor in Chief Nilay Patel has previously expressed interest in integrating The Verge with ActivityPub.

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Gloss is hosted by Compiled on the Ghost CMS and will definitely also be adding ActivityPub support as soon as their integration launches.