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There are big changes afoot at Vox! We’re headed to television. We’re launching a daily podcast. We have a new editor-in-chief, and a new executive editor and director of editorial strategy. And my role is changing, too! Here’s the memo I sent to the Vox team on what’s coming next.
I write with exciting news. Effective immediately, Lauren Williams will be Vox’s new editor-in-chief. Allison Rockey will be our new executive editor and director of editorial strategy. And I’ll be Vox’s editor-at-large.
These are big changes, and they’re the product of many months of thinking about how Vox needs to be structured to thrive amid the pressures of this news era and to take advantage of the huge opportunities that lie before us.
Soon, we’ll be launching our most ambitious foray into audio journalism yet: a daily explainer podcast, staffed by a dedicated six-person team and tasked with bringing our core approach to the news to a whole new audience.
After that, we’ll be launching our most ambitious video project yet: Next year, Vox will bring its explanatory journalism to TV.
In addition, we’re launching new podcasts and video series, expanding to cover more topics, leaning further into visual-first journalism both on and off the site, and covering one of the strangest and most intense political eras in American history. Then we still have the daily challenge of getting better, faster, sharper, smarter, more sourced, and more ambitious around the work we already do.
We launched Vox three and a half years ago. Our newsroom now comprises more than 100 journalists, and in the past year alone, our content views have increased by more than 55 percent and the time our audience spends with us has gone up more than 125 percent. We are doing more, and doing it better, than I dared imagine.
But to keep thriving, we need a management structure that’s built for this kind of growth.
That, I think, is a good segue to my changing role. Being Vox’s editor-in-chief has been one of the great honors and thrills of my life. I cannot properly express my pride in what we’ve built or my awe over what you all do each day. But as the demands of managing Vox have continued to grow, it’s become clear to me that Vox needs a full-time editor-in-chief, not someone trying to balance the role alongside others.
Going forward, I’ll be working on Vox’s overall strategy, new editorial initiatives (like the daily explainer podcast and our new TV work), and my own reporting and creating. The last part is particularly important to me: This is as confusing and uncertain an era as I’ve seen in American politics, and I need to spend more time reporting on it in order to help Vox navigate through it.
I can only do this, though, because Vox has such tremendous leaders able to chart our course into the future. Replacing me as editor-in-chief will be Lauren Williams. Lauren joined Vox a few months into our existence, and from the moment she walked in the door, I’ve relied constantly on her brilliance, her calm, and her judgment, and all of us have relied on her constant focus on the quality of our journalism, the mechanics of the organization, and the morale of the people within it. She’s the exact right person to lead us in a new phase of growth — to make sure we’re built to handle it, that we’re being conscious of the strains it places on us, and that our work is always deep, decent, and ambitious.
Joining Lauren in that effort will be Allison Rockey, who has since Vox’s inception led our voyages onto new platforms, and who has brought a rare thoroughness and creativity to editorial strategy and organizational growth. Vox is better than any news organization in the world at reimagining itself for new places while staying true to its core mission, and that success is largely due to Allison’s vision and talent. She’s the exact right person to drive our editorial strategy in this era.
As always, I’m endlessly grateful to all of you who make Vox the remarkable institution it is each and every day. This is an exciting moment for us, it’s going to be an exciting year for us, and I can’t imagine a better group of people to share it with.
