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The Verge Publisher Vox Media Acquires Re/code

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Chris Crum

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There’s a lot happening in the world of tech news media. The latest piece of news in the publisher circuit is that Vox Media (The Verge, SB Nation, Polygon, Vox.com, Eater, Racked, Curbed) is acquiring Re/code roughly a year and a half after its launch.

Re/code was started at the beginning of 2014 after All Things D, led by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, was spun off from The Wall Street Journal. It has operated under a company called Revere Digital, which launched with backing from NBCUniversal News Group and Windsor Media. It also hosted the Code Conference, which happens to be going on right now.

A post on the Vox Media blog says:

Re/code will continue to publish at Recode.net and across other platforms. Its coverage areas will complement those of the The Verge, our leading consumer tech lifestyle brand, by focusing particularly on tech business news and analysis.

Re/code’s renowned tech and business conference division will continue to grow, and we will explore ways to apply Re/code’s leadership in this space to our other media brands over time.

Re/code will benefit from Vox Media’s infrastructure and resources, and will eventually move on to Chorus, Vox Media’s proprietary platform. The current members of Re/code’s staff will soon be employees of Vox Media.

Welcome, Kara, Walt, and the Re/code team to Vox Media!

A post from Siwsher and Mossberg says:

We want to assure you that this combination is designed to bolster and enrich Re/code, and that we will continue to publish under the same name and leadership, with editorial independence. We will also continue to hold our signature Code conferences, and even add new ones, again with the same core team and the same philosophy.

Re/code will benefit from joining Vox Media by integrating Vox Media’s various capabilities — including marketing, communications, audience development, sales and production. We will also eventually migrate to Vox Media’s beautiful, powerful and flexible proprietary publishing platform, which will give us new ways to present our stories to you.

We plan as well to collaborate where appropriate with Vox Media’s current and very successful tech news site, The Verge. While the two sites occasionally overlap, we have focused on the business of tech, while The Verge has focused on covering tech from a lifestyle perspective.

We are excited that, after only 18 months, we are able to join Vox Media’s great family of sites and gain new resources and colleagues that will help us grow and get better at focusing on what matters most to you, our readers.

Here’s a video of the two joking and talking about the news followed by Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff talking about it at the conference:

Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief at The Verge, also wrote a post about welcoming Re/code to Vox Media, how they’ll work together, and how The Verge itself is also growing. He wrote:

When the opportunity to work more closely with Recode arrived, it made perfect sense: Recode covers the business of technology better than any other publication in the world. Kara and Walt have built a juggernaut of reporting talent and an unparallelled conference series designed for business leaders and executives, and the competition isn’t even close. Bringing Recode into the Vox Media fold means that The Verge can remain focused on being the best mainstream technology and lifestyle site in the world, and Recode can dig even deeper into how the money and business of technology works. Recode will maintain its site and branding, but over time we’ll work hard to find as many ways to work together as possible.

We are making one change, though: Recode’s tremendous reviews team of Lauren Goode, Katie Boehret, and Bonnie Cha will join the Verge staff, and Walt Mossberg will be writing reviews and columns for both sites. It’s an exciting expansion of our already best-in-the-business tech news and reviews team, and I can’t wait to see what they do with The Verge’s incredible platform and resources.

And that’s all just the start. We’re also increasing our overall investment in The Verge, and setting the stage to grow even bigger across the multiple platforms our audience finds us on every day. We’ve just hired new entertainment, science, and app reporters, and we are about to begin aggressively hiring transportation reporters. The incredible Verge Video team will double in size over the next few months. And we will continue hiring across The Verge as the year continues. It’s going to be an insane ride.

As mentioned at the beginning, this is just the latest change in the tech media blogosphere. As reported yesterday, Gigaom, which announced its demise earlier this year, is being relaunched in August after being acquired by Knowingly. The site will continue with its existing domain and content library, but will move forward without the staff who made created it all.

Other recent and major tech blog news came when Verizon announced its acquisition of AOL, which includes content sites like TechCrunch and Engadget. Those are about to be owned by Verizon.

Image via Twitter

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