MEDIA

Vox Media Adds ReCode to Its Stable of Websites

By 
Walt Mossberg, left, and Kara Swisher, center, of ReCode, with Jim Bankoff, chief of Vox Media, before the start of the Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., on Tuesday.Kendrick Brinson for The New York Times 
ReCode, the news website led by the veteran journalists Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, is being acquired by Vox Media, a deal that reflects the turmoil among digital organizations focused on covering the tech industry.
The all-stock deal, financial terms of which were not disclosed, will give ReCode access to a wider audience, something it has struggled to build since the site split off from The Wall Street Journal about a year and a half ago. Both plan to stay with ReCode after the merger.
The purchase of ReCode, which was announced by the companies on Tuesday, is just the latest significant move involving a digital media start-up in the past few months. In March, Gigaom, which had been one of the early sites dedicated to coverage of Silicon Valley, abruptly closed after nine years because of financial problems. (It said Tuesday that it planned to restart in August after being acquired by the start-up Knowingly Corp.) Circa, a news aggregation start-up, is trying to sell itself to a larger media organization after failing to raise more venture capital, according to two people familiar with internal matters, though recent talks with companies like Twitter have fizzled. And Pando, another technology blog, has struggled to attract a large following despite a splashy introduction announcing prominent writers.
Before its split from The Journal and its parent company, Dow Jones, ReCode was run as a site called AllThingsD, which, since its founding in 2007, had steadily built a following among technology executives. The site grew out of a popular conference business that became known for hosting tech luminaries like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. The conference business continued to grow and was an attractive part of ReCode’s portfolio for Vox.
But as traditional news organizations and upstarts alike descended on Silicon Valley, ReCode found itself somewhat lost in the crowd.
“Everybody is bigger than us,” Ms. Swisher said in a phone interview. “It’s not a secret that being a smaller fish is really hard.”
ReCode said it had 44 full-time employees and three contract employees. They were expected to join Vox, though Vox would not elaborate on potential staffing changes.
Since ReCode began operating independently, companies like BuzzFeed, Vice and Vox have each raked in tens of millions of dollars in venture capital while heavily staffing up on young journalists and aggressive advertising departments.
Despite developing a reputation for consistently breaking industry news, ReCode has struggled to draw significant traffic. The site receives 1.5 million regular monthly visitors, according to comScore.
ReCode will become part of Vox’s expanding digital empire, which includes the popular sports site SB Nation, as well as the technology site The Verge. ReCode also will gain access to Vox’s publishing platform, Chorus, which has been a key in luring marquee journalists including Ezra Klein.
Vox Media attracted 53.2 million unique visitors in the United States across its sites in April, according to comScore. The Verge alone had traffic of nearly 12 million, according to comScore, far greater than ReCode’s audience.
The size of that audience, especially for The Verge, was a particular draw for Ms. Swisher and Mr. Mossberg, who together controlled the majority of ReCode. In return, ReCode — with its access to technology executives and the ability to break major news stories — could lend The Verge more legitimacy. And while both sites cover technology, Nilay Patel, the editor in chief of The Verge, said they had different perspectives.
“The Verge is explicitly not a business publication,” Mr. Patel said. Rather, he added, the site “is about being a new kind of culture publication.” One recent article on the site was titled “How my girlfriend and I tried to fit the Apple Watch into our relationship.” Another headline, however, noted Uber’s raising of $1.6 billion in convertible debt.
ReCode closely covers the business of the technology industry, with frequent articles on financing rounds, earnings reports and executive moves.
The sites’ leaders acknowledged they could find themselves fighting over stories. But Jim Bankoff, the chief executive of Vox Media, stressed that an internal study indicated there was only a 3 percent overlap in content between the two sites.
For Vox, the acquisition of ReCode is part of Mr. Bankoff’s ambitious plan to create a kind of Time Inc. for the digital age, with a portfolio of publications that appeal to a wide swath of viewers. (ReCode’s existing investors — Windsor Media, an investment firm run by the former Yahoo chief executive Terry S. Semel, and the NBCUniversal News Group — will retain small stakes in the combined company.)
In the fall of 2013, Vox Media acquired the Curbed Network, which includes the sites Curbed, Eater and Racked. And in April last year, it started Vox.com, a news site led by Mr. Klein, who previously founded The Washington Post’s popular Wonkblog. Vox Media recently raised $46.5 million in a round of financing from General Atlantic, which valued the company at nearly $400 million.
In April, Vox Media announced it would begin selling its Chorus content management system to advertisers, allowing them to create so-called native content across the company’s sites — and also giving the company a new revenue stream. Mr. Bankoff said ReCode’s conference business would also bolster Vox Media’s bottom line.
“Our growth and momentum has never been higher,” he said.