Vox Media Acquires The Coral Project From Mozilla

By Amit Chowdhry ● Jan 24, 2019

Vox Media has acquired an open-source publishing platform called The Coral Project from the Mozilla Foundation. Through this acquisition, Vox Media will be able to further diversify its revenue streams by licensing software-as-a-service technology. The terms of the deal were undisclosed.

The Coral Project — which is currently being used by 50 newsrooms across 12 countries such as The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, and Fairfax Media — will continue operating as an open-source platform and it will provide newsrooms with tools and technology for better managing commenting sections, according to Axios.


Photo: Vox

As part of the deal, Vox will acquire all of The Coral Project’s intellectual property including the name, website, and social account. Plus Vox is also bringing on The Coral Project’s six full-time staff members for its products division, including Andrew Losowsky, Kim Gardner, Wyatt Johnson, Samantha Hankins, Chi Vinh Le (aka Kiwi), and Jessie Rushing. These team members will be reporting to Vox’s chief operating officer Trei Brundrett. Brundrett also oversees Vox Media’s Chorus platform.

Following the acquisition, Vox Media will be selling the Coral Project’s “Talk” platform as part of its suite of tech products along with the “Chorus” content management platform and the “Concert” digital ad platform as a package or a la carte.

The Coral Project originally started out as a project by Mozilla in collaboration with The New York Times and The Washington Post. And it also received a grant from The Knight Foundation.

“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,” wrote Vox’s chief product officer Joe Alicata in a blog post. “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 started out more than ten years ago since the company launched a number of sports blogs, which got turned into SB Nation. And since then, Vox built a monthly audience of nearly 100 million unique visitors across all of its editorial networks.