“It’s a 25-year-old idea with no news hook,” Posner said. Posner decided to “tell the story of the door” along with Roman Mars, the host of the podcast 99% Invisible. ![]() Posner had become interested in the concept of human-centered design, which was pioneered by Don Norman a quarter of a century ago. The door looks as if it’s supposed to open out but actually opens in. One of Posner’s favorite videos was sparked by his hatred of a certain door in the Vox offices. It’s not an assignment that’s been passed down the line.” You can’t not be invested, because it’s your idea, and you’re coming up with the design and look of it. Every one of our team members has gotten up to speed on the process. We’ve hired people at different levels, but when you set the expectation, people rise to the occasion. Each person hired is “expected to have skills in all these areas. “What’s made our team thrive is that we were scrappy at the beginning,” said Joss Fong, senior editorial producer and Posner’s first hire. By contrast, “the Vox team works like independent YouTubers.” For any given video, a single person is responsible for the entire production process, from pitch to publication. Under that model, large teams take an assembly-line approach to creating a video, where each person has a specific role and the person who writes a script is not the same person who edits the video or publishes it to the Internet. “A lot of Internet video, especially from traditional media organizations, has evolved in a way that mimics the structure of TV,” said Matt Vree, Vox’s executive producer of video. Posner has also steered the team away from interviews (with a few notable exceptions, like President Obama): “There’s usually no reason to watch an interview. A person sitting behind a desk talking, he thinks, is “one of those tropes of cable news that made their way into other news’ organizations’ first attempts at online video” and in many cases remains (you’ll see it all over Facebook Live videos, too). “I made one rule starting out: no desks,” Posner said. Vox.com is wary of producing videos that feel too much like cable. The team has now grown to 11 full-time employees in New York, San Francisco, and Washington. “What Vox video is, is almost entirely due to Joe,” Klein said. The video division began as a team of one: multimedia director Joe Posner, whom Klein had met at a conference. When Vox.com launched two years ago, none of its founders had much video experience. That means thinking of videos as pieces that can stand on their own, not “the way to slightly better monetize an article page,” Klein said. “Vox.com, the core site, is an important one, and a central one, but it isn’t the only one, and I’ve come to really believe that we need to value the YouTube following, the Facebook video following, the Snapchat following equally.” ![]() “There are a lot of different Voxes,” Klein said. The anecdote goes to show that the Vox brand means different things to different people, and “explainer website launched by Washington Post wunderkind Ezra Klein” is probably not the most common. “When he saw that someone was taking our videos and making them viral on Facebook and it wasn’t Vox, he was honestly upset.” “The way this person knew Vox was as a YouTube brand,” Klein told me. (Today it has more than 53 million views and has been shared nearly a million times.) A few days later, Vox writers started getting tweets and Facebook posts accusing Klein of freebooting: ![]() Vox editor-in-chief Ezra Klein also posted it to his Facebook page, where it racked up millions of views. Last fall, Vox.com published a video on Syria’s civil war to its YouTube channel, where it’s ended up with nearly 2.5 million views.
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