In January, Ezra Klein, the prolific creator of the Washington Post’s influential political news rag Wonkblog, announced that he was decamping to a relatively young digital startup named Vox Media. Unusually, Klein professed admiration for the company’s content-management system, a web-based platform called Chorus, as a major reason for choosing Vox. Chorus “is already helping us rethink the way we power newsrooms and present information,” he wrote.
You’ve probably read something in a Vox Media publication in the past year. The young company publishes the sports blog SBNation, the gaming site Polygon, and the tech site the Verge. In November, CEO Jim Bankoff paid a reported $25 million to purchase Curbed Networks, publisher of the eponymous real estate news site as well as Eater (dining) and Racked (retail). In the last year, these six sites have seen their readership grow more than 75%. Taken collectively, Vox marshals an online audience larger than that of the Post or Forbes.
It would be easy to credit Vox’s success solely to its increasing stable of talented journalists tasked with producing high-quality content. (Its titles mostly eschew traffic-inducing gimmicks.) But Vox has mostly been successful as a media company because it is every bit as much a technology company. Its most powerful tool? Chorus. “You need to embrace technology,” Bankoff says. “It’s core to creating a great product that can scale technically and economically.”
Content-management systems are tools that writers and editors use to assemble words and pictures on the page. One of the biggest challenges media companies face as they scramble to extend themselves to new digital platforms is finding a system that actually improves workflows. Often the fit is imperfect: Off-the-rack systems like WordPress and Drupal offer limited functionality for large, complex newsrooms. Homegrown systems can be expensive and technologically inferior. And even if a rising media company builds a worthy custom tool, it can quickly outgrow it, sending developers back to the drawing board.
Chorus may be the exception, according to Digiday editor-in-chief Brian Morrissey, who has analyzed digital media trends for more than a decade. “The bar is so low with publishing technology,” he says. “Vox doesn’t have to build the next Google to have some kind of advantage.”
First developed six years ago, Chorus allows editors to coordinate and plan, manages structured data (such as sports statistics and product specifications), and makes it easy to experiment with new advertising formats. It distributes stories on social networks easily and offers real-time metrics on how well content resonates with audiences. Bankoff considered licensing Chorus to other media companies, but chose instead to launch or acquire publications to use the tech.
Vox is ultimately a media company. If its content flags, impressive tech won’t retain readers and advertisers. But slick tools like Chorus give Vox an advantage.
This story is from the March 17, 2014 issue of Fortune.
