It's not often that a journalist will admit to falling off the news cycle. And yet for Melissa Bell, co-founder with Ezra Klein of explanatory news site Vox.com, that experience lies at the heart of her progressive views on journalism and at the core of what Vox is trying to do.
"We [the media industry] present the news in a way that puts forward the newest information, not the most important information," she says, fighting off the ravages of a launch-week cold. She's talking about Vox's slogan – Understand the News – but also about the motivation for the site, which launched on 6 April under the auspices of Vox Media, home to SB Nation and tech site The Verge.
It's not that people don't understand the news, Bell explains. But an obsession with new information can be offputting to readers who are not up to date with an issue. The claim is backed by personal experience: in 2012 Bell moved from a reporting role at the Washington Post to take a more strategic position, directing blog strategy. "It was amazing to me as a reader how quickly I felt I fell off the news cycle," she says. "If I wasn't paying attention to the rapid developments, it was difficult for me to understand what was happening in major news stories. When I took that step back I realised the challenge of being a reader."
Also at the Washington Post at the time was Klein, then making a name for himself with his policy-focused Wonkblog – slogan: "Economic and domestic policy, and lots of it". In January this year Klein announced he was leaving the Post to start his own news organisation, taking with him Bell, then director of platforms, and Wonkblog writer Dylan Matthews. Slate's economics blogger Matthew Yglesias announced he was joining the then-unnamed new venture a few days later.
Bell says it was a very tough decision to make the move. "I love the Washington Post and I love my former colleagues," she says, praising the paper's "innovative technology spirit" and journalism talent. "But the Post has a job to do that is different from the job I wanted to focus on. And I was ready for a new challenge."
This challenge was explaining the news, with Vox.com joining Nate Silver's ESPN-backed FiveThirtyEight site and the New York Times' The Upshot in a new wave of data-driven explanatory news services. Central to Vox's efforts are its Vox Cards, Wikipedia-esque virtual cards that offer context to articles and deeper explanation of key concepts. They appear behind highlighted words in articles and also in separate Card stacks, giving constantly updated guides to ongoing news stories, which readers can browse or dive into at their leisure.
"We wanted to give this idea of a digestible portion of the context of a story in each card, so it is not intimidating. You don't have to read all 25 Cards in the deck, you can read just one," says Bell, who adds that Cards are the first of many ideas that the company will explore to get people into "those nuggets of information" around the news. The simplicity of Cards – one, for example, simply asks "What is marijuana?" – as well as their perceived similarity to Wikipedia has led to criticism. New York's Complex magazine tweeted "Is Vox.com just a fancy Wikipedia or nah?", while Buzzfeed's Ayesha Siddiqi described the site as "Wikipedia with the self perception of Rap Genius".
More seriously, Vox has faced accusations of peddling "leftwing propaganda" from RedState blogger Erick Erickson, who took issue with a Vox Explains video on US national debt, which he says uses "deficit" and "debt" interchangeably. Bell is unruffled by such criticism, pointing out that Vox launched as work in progress so that the team could learn on the job. She says she appreciates constructive critiques, such as a recent piece from the Washington Post's Erik Wemple which addressed corrections on Vox.com, as it helps the team to improve the site.
Besides, she appears to have some sympathy for the view that Vox may lack political diversity, recently tweeting that Vox "does not have as diverse a staff as we want. And we are learning and shaping our team as we grow." Bell made the comment in response to a blogpost from Emily Bell, in which the Guardian columnist claimed that "the great VC‑backed media blitz of 2014", including Vox, FiveThirtyEight and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's First Look Media, is being led almost exclusively by white males as it ostensibly aims to reform journalism.
Melissa Bell's criticism is that the Guardian blogpost "diminished my role and the role of many women shaping digital media today" by not acknowledging her role at Vox. She sees it as impossible for media organisations to explain a broad range of stories if all their reporters come from the same perspectives, with diversity a complicated matter of everything from gender to politics.
"Great ideas come from many different sources," she explains. "When you are building a new media company it is important to have a team that reflects the type of audience that we want to have." How will Vox address this? Bell replies that chief among "a bunch of things" is making sure job postings are spread as widely as possible. "It is important to broaden our reach in talking about our company and what we are doing," she adds.
Speaking via Skype from Vox's offices in Washington DC, Bell sounds extremely enthusiastic about her new job, which allows her to explore her love for data journalism – "one of the most fun parts to watch in journalism today". And yet you can understand her annoyance at being portrayed in the media as Klein's hire at Vox, rather than as partner and co-founder.
Equally, you can see why the high-profile Klein – who was named one of the 50 most powerful people in Washington by GQ in 2012 – has taken much of the limelight at Vox, with Bell claiming she likes to exist "in the shadows". Her job, too, is unusual for a media company, spanning technology and editorial as executive editor and senior product manager. "What that means on a day-to-day basis: a whole lot of chaos," Bell says. "My main focus is working with the product team to build out the site and figure out the technological direction we want to take. But I get to have a hand in thinking about our editorial vision, worrying about hiring, making sure the staff is happy and healthy and hale, sweating over some editing, pondering our community strategy."
When she has more time, Bell says she will turn her hand again to writing, having started her career in journalism in Delhi where she helped to launch Mint newspaper, a business newspaper that collaborates with the Wall Street Journal, and wrote for the paper's weekend lifestyle magazine. At the Washington Post, which she joined in 2010, she was a columnist for the Style section, writing about the culture of the internet, before moving to her strategic role.
For now, though, she is concentrating on the development of Vox.com, where she believes an innate commitment to explanatory journalism – right down to it being built into the work flow – will see the site stand out in an increasingly crowded field.
"I would attribute the rise of FiveThirtyEight and Vox and all of these different sites to the fact that there is just an opportunity to do different journalism right now," Bell says. "There's investment money in journalism, there hasn't been for a number of years. The tools are easier to create this type of journalism. There's a real hunger from readers for more quality journalism out there.
"It is a real time of expansion," she concludes. "So it is a good time to be in journalism right now."
