What Vox Media Is Doing Right
Why explanatory journalism is here to stay, explained.
Before we can dive into why “explanatory” or “explainer” journalism has taken off in today’s information-saturated world, we have to look at how advancements in technology have changed information sharing, and what Vox Media does to take advantage of the stage we’re in today.
Before all of that,
What is Vox Media?
Vox media didn’t just appear, it was a long time in the making. Its conception was with a sports platform dedicated to Oakland athletics. When this blog joined with The Verge, a technology news platform, Vox Media was born. But its genius is not in its origin story, it's in the approach to journalism.
Vox Media is a self-proclaimed source of explanatory journalism. This is different from traditional journalism, which according to the Encyclopedia of Mobile Phone Behavior (seriously, this exists), can be defined as “Any form of mass communication available before the advent of digital media. This includes television, radio, newspapers, books, and magazines.”
We’ll get into that. But aside from the actual medium in which journalism is being shared, Vox’s success hinges on another idea: explaining.
This is different from traditional ideas about what journalism is, which answers questions of who, what, when, and where. Vox Media platforms take this information and transform it to meet another goal: Why and how?
Important context, data, possible outcomes, and conclusions that may not exist in traditional journalism are a central component of Vox’s reporting.
To understand why this matters, let’s dive into a bit of history for ourselves.
The History of Journalism
Let's jump back to the year 1440 when a goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg combined a few existing technologies (by technology I mean oil-based ink, not iPads and spaceships) to create the first printing press.
Before this creation, the only way to share news was by hand-written notes and articles and by word of mouth.
According to Gutenberg’s Wikipedia page,
“His work started the Printing Revolution and is regarded as a milestone of the second millennium, ushering in the modern period of human history.[3] It played a key role in the development of the Renaissance, Reformation, Age of Enlightenment, and Scientific Revolution, as well as laying the material basis for the modern knowledge-based economy and the spread of learning to the masses.”
Talk about impact! The printing press changed everything, making paper the very first mass medium (a completely un-ironic ode to the genius of this platform, using the internet — today’s medium) of sharing information.
20th century: Radio and Television
The next big shift was when technology advanced to capture and share sound.
The radio was another way of collecting and spreading information that was essential in the first-ever global war; World War I. The first-ever commercial radio broadcast was on November 2nd, 1920 and it proved the power of radio to people by sharing the results of the Harding-Cox presidential election before newspapers could.
Not long after, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) was born — iconic for its King’s and Queen’s speeches and daily news deliverance across the UK.
Then came television. TV was a long time in the making but its development was interrupted by World War II. When the war subsided, yet another mass medium for sharing information took root in society.
With each advancement in information sharing technology, the speed and quantity of information people have access to increases. Of course, the next era of information sharing caused an exponential change that transformed the world…
21st century: The Internet
As you know from reading this article, you are using today’s most popular medium of information sharing — the internet.
The concept of a shared web of information was developed during the Cold War between the United States and Russia. The U.S. was doing its best to find ways to communicate in signals that could not be intercepted, thus leading to the idea of sending encrypted information from one computer to another.
Not so long ago in 1991, Tim Berners-Lee came up with the World Wide Web, a way for anyone with internet access to reach an entire web of information that exists separate from computers and their ability to send information to and from each other directly.
Why All Of This Matters
You came here to talk about journalism and the rising success of explanatory reporting — so why am I giving a brief history of the technologies that advanced information sharing?
Because each advancement made the sharing of information faster, more accessible, and more democratic. Each transformation brought with it unintended side-effects, ones that the German goldsmith in 1440 never could have imagined — from an overabundance of information to shorter attention spans.
The new challenge is not how to access information, but how to muddle through all of it to find what is reliable, valid, and informative.
Traditional journalism aims to meet the need of the people: to tell them what’s going on in the world.
Now there is a new desire: to understand what’s going on and to know why any of it matters.
Vox’s success story is in recognizing this, and capitalizing on the gap in the market by explaining what consumers are either consciously or unconsciously asking now: Why?
Why are conflicts around the world actually happening? Why does this new legislation matter historically? Why do protests in one part of the world have anything to do with protests in another?
There are so many “whys” and “hows” to be satisfied these days, and overall it appears people want to understand. This has allowed for a new sort of journalism to unfold, one that cannot replace the “what, where, and when,” but adds to it.
