Ev BogueA Murdoch bought New York Magazine.
That is the headline. The rest is footnotes. James Murdoch — the one Vanity Fair keeps writing redemption arcs about, the son who broke with dad over climate, the Murdoch they want you to root for — paid more than $300 million through Lupa Systems for New York Magazine, Vox.com, and the Vox podcast network. Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff stays on to run the lot. The Verge, Eater, and SB Nation are not part of the package. Just the names, the back catalog, and The Vulture — the blog that used to have some teeth.
The press release quotes James expressing deep commitment to ambitious journalism. The press release will say that. Every press release says that. The press release said it when Time Inc. got eaten by Meredith, when Joe Ricketts blew up DNAinfo, when Sports Illustrated got hollowed into a licensing exercise by Authentic Brands. It is the noise the corpse makes when it changes hands.
Whether James Murdoch runs his properties meaningfully differently from his father is a question for the people who still grade Murdoch heirs on a curve. I will leave them to it. What I know is that the family name is already on Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, and as of this afternoon it is on New York Magazine, and that is the shape of the thing. A dynasty in the business of buying media and remaking it in a more convenient shape just bought one of the last mastheads that meant anything.
A reputation built over decades got line-itemed and sold. New York was, for a long stretch, genuinely good. The Vulture did cultural criticism that mattered. The writers and editors who built that masthead are watching this happen too. They will not be quoted today. They still need the gig.
I should disclose. I worked there. Briefly. NYMag had just run Clive Thompson's "Blogs to Riches" — the cover story that turned bloggers into a business case — and the magazine was spinning up blogs of its own to match. The Vulture was one of them. They needed bodies. I had interned at Gawker. That was apparently the entire qualification. I cropped photos, matched images to stories, went to the wrong meetings. The same masthead later ran Vanessa Grigoriadis's "Everybody Sucks", the long Gawker profile about the rage of the creative underclass — which was, give or take, a description of the staff NYMag had been hiring. Including me. I was nobody. I have no standing to mourn this. I am telling you because it is satisfying, in a small and useless way, to name what just happened.
A Murdoch bought New York. Spare me the press release.
If you were in a building too, at some point, email me at ev@evbogue.com or text 773-510-8601.