Encountering a random selection of high-end publications online, you might not think they had much in common. For example, The Ringer is a sports-centric website started by Bill Simmons that banks on podcast production; Vox is Ezra Klein's politics-explainer behemoth; and Funny or Die is a decidedly non-journalistic viral-comedy-video producer co-founded by Will Ferrell. And yet, although they don't appear particularly alike in their visual or editorial outlook, they all run on the same publishing technology, a content-management system called Chorus, developed and licensed by Vox's parent company, Vox Media. Behind the scenes, each publication's contributors type into the same boxes, use the same search-engine optimization tactics, and might have their work festooned with banner advertisements sold through Vox Media's integrated ad service, Concert. The publications are interconnected, in short, like a forest sharing the same root system.
Content-management systems—CMSs for short—are a larger concern for media executives, engineers, and editors than they are for readers, who will likely never see the software. It's an abstruse topic; we may as well discuss the geopolitics of Adobe InDesign or the impact of various office chairs on journalism. But CMSs are becoming a more important force in the media, as news businesses branch out into developing and selling their own.
Beyond Chorus, Jeff Bezos's Washington Post is licensing its content-management system, Arc, to clients like The Boston Globe and Le Parisien; New York magazine's Clay, an open-source project that anyone can adapt, was used by Slate behind the scenes of its recent redesign; and Hearst is spreading its MediaOS across the company's titles, with the hope of licensing it in the future. The New York Times has its own proprietary CMS called Scoop, which it doesn't share. (The naming conventions alone are an unheralded form of corporate poetry.)
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