I'm excited to announce that The Verge's parent company Vox Media is acquiring Recode, the terrific tech business news site and conference business founded by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg just over a year ago.
This is going to be fun.
If you've been following The Verge over the past year, you've noticed that we've aggressively expanded our coverage from tech to entertainment, science, and now transportation. That bet worked: The Verge is now bigger and more popular than ever. Over 24.5 million people visited the site in April, a 33 percent increase from last year, and we're delivering 40 million video streams a month.
But along the way, we made a big decision: The Verge is not a business site.
The Verge is for people interested in understanding the exciting and bewildering everyday changes of the future. It's for all of us trying to figure out how we should live and act and behave in this enchanting new world of screens. It's for people wondering what to spend their money on — and for people thinking about how spending that money affects everyone else around them. It's for knowing about trends and ideas across technology and culture first. It's about art and science coming together to spark one of the fastest eras of change in history. The Verge is for understanding life on the cutting edge.
The Verge is for everyone.
So 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.
Here we go.
Comments
Beef.
The future is looking bright, ladies and gentlemen.
By samsheffer on 05.26.15 6:05pm
Will Walt be scoring reviews with Beef or Bust?
By Franklin Thao on 05.26.15 6:08pm
Excited to see Lauren Goode behind the lens <3
By Shisanyama on 05.26.15 6:28pm
Agreed. Having Lauren here at The Verge will be totally awesome.
By MarkusDi on 05.26.15 6:36pm
Please make an iOS app for the verge.
By strider2 on 05.27.15 7:05am
Apps are ovah!
By ravnotraj on 05.27.15 9:51am
They used to have one. I liked it but I get that its a mission to keep up to date – far easier to just focus on the mobile view of the main website. But I do miss it.
By Andrew Eames on 05.27.15 11:36am
I feel bad that legendary journalists are being acquired by nouveaux riches, only because they couldn’t sell ads well.
The only advantage Vox had over Re/code is the venture capital money that it used to to hire a bunch of advertising guys who basically weaved ads into content more tightly. The quality of Walt and Kara’s coverage was light years ahead of anything that exists in tech writing for the masses.
That, and using a .net as your main domain name was just asking for trouble.
It’s also ironic that a good chunk of people who made Engadget/The Verge awesome are now back with traditional media outlets, while the guys who split off from the WSJ are being bought by basically a sports blogging company.
By Engrudget on 05.27.15 12:39pm
Lets face it guys Re/Code people are far better, sharper and edgy than Verge team. And I don’t know the Voxy corporate news journalism jibber jabber. But I hope to see TheVerge flourish now again. Its been long overdue.
By Jhala_Ashish on 05.27.15 1:53pm
Why is your username in the center?
By shikori o on 05.27.15 8:29am
White pic?
By Mr Lefleur on 05.28.15 8:28am
SAM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
By Kelsey Scherer on 05.26.15 6:13pm
"Yaas!":
By BrandonFloyd7 on 05.26.15 6:57pm
When will you guys hire MKBHD?
By Ezhik on 05.26.15 11:50pm
Please God no!!!
Love MKBHD and I’d hate for his videos to be locked behind Verge’s video player
Or for him to have to report on Taylor Swift or Kardashian ‘news’
By UncleBobbings on 05.27.15 2:25am
The verge’s videos aren’t locked behind their player either;
https://www.youtube.com/user/TheVerge
By escalinci on 05.27.15 6:52am
A fraction of their video output is there, though.
By AluKed on 05.27.15 7:22am
Why you gotta go hating on Taylor Swift?
By Shaun McIlroy on 05.27.15 7:19am
Apparently, tech people hate pop culture.
By theonlyfred on 05.27.15 7:24am
Because Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time
By VoxMediaUser2710422 on 05.27.15 10:12am
‘Cause she’s just not that good a singer…
By ian.ryan on 05.27.15 11:42am
C’mon homie. C’mon. Let’s not say hyperboles that are too extreme.
By Kirielson on 05.27.15 11:43am
Alrighty, I’ll be more precise: she’s a mediocre singer who gets a lot of her popularity from a combination of appearing wholesome while wearing realllllly short shorts. Her voice doesn’t have a shred of personality, but she’s cute and she has "country" authenticity so I guess she’s considered legit or something to heterosexual males and pubescent girls. She’s Britney Spears for republicans. It will be fun to see where she’s at when she turns 30. I’m guessing she’ll go back to country as the pop machine will have chewed her up and spit her out (and made her comfortably wealthy).
By ian.ryan on 05.28.15 2:05am
Haters gonna hate hate hate.
By Friend-Bob on 05.27.15 2:42pm
Because her musical output is insufferable, basically.
By KeithZG on 05.27.15 9:21pm