Vox Media Adds The Coral Project

We are excited to announce that the founding team of The Coral Project—Andrew Losowsky, Kim Gardner, Wyatt Johnson, Samantha Hankins, Chi Vinh Le (aka Kiwi), and Jessie Rushing—are joining the Vox Media Product team. Here, they will continue to build out their premier open source community product, Talk, and launch a hosted SaaS version of the platform for publishers.

Building SaaS businesses on top of our media products is not new to us. This started with the launch of our publisher-led advertising marketplace, Concert, and continued with opening Chorus as a hosted product for publishers early last year. The addition of Coral to the Vox Media portfolio not only means a continued investment into community and audience engagement products, it also establishes a new line of business that helps support our ability to bring quality journalism to our audiences worldwide.

The Coral Project, whose mission is to create a safe and productive space for online communities and discussion, was founded in 2014 as a collaboration between the Mozilla Foundation, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. Today, the Coral Talk platform powers the communities of nearly 50 publishers in 12 countries, including The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, The Intercept, and New York Magazine.

You can read more about the announcement posted in the Vox Media newsroom or on Coral’s blog, but we wanted to share a bit more context here from the product and technology perspective.

First, the Vox Media product team believes strongly in open source and we are fully committed and excited to continue supporting Talk as an open source project. Current adopters of the open source project can, of course, continue to run Talk at their discretion, and we welcome existing and new contributors to the project to help build this best-in-class open source community platform.

Vox Media was founded with community in our DNA. It’s now more than ten years since we first launched a handful of sports blogs, which would become SB Nation, on a shared platform, which was eventually branded Chorus. In that time, we’ve built a monthly audience of nearly 100 million unique visitors* across all of our editorial networks in part by giving our audiences access to powerful and robust tools to make their voice heard and connect with one another. Our team, now including Andrew, Kim, Wyatt, Samantha, Kiwi, and Jessie, is excited and inspired to continue building great community products that empower those users, and to create safe, productive spaces where they can connect over shared interests. Practically speaking, this investment signals a renewed investment in our commenting platform and the moderation tools necessary to create and nurture online communities. Long term, we’re excited where the Coral team will take us as we continue to solve our most critical community challenges and ultimately aim to reinvent audience and community engagement on the Internet.

Over time the Talk platform will be deeply integrated into Chorus and onto our own networks, like SB Nation, who are investing in their communities. Coral will also be made available as an add-on for current and future Chorus SaaS customers. We will also offer Talk as a standalone hosted SaaS product for publishers who want the best community tools in the business, without adopting the full Chorus platform. Those wishing to install and self-host Talk can continue to do that with our ongoing commitment to preserving its open source status.

Please join us in welcoming The Coral Project to Vox Media and Vox Product! We can’t wait to show you what’s next.

*Comscore report: December 2018