Game Politics: What do you think happened with the long-form stuff at Polygon after your exit? Was it a matter of money, or traffic, or something else?
Russ: At least as far as the people I worked with, and reported to, and interacted with at Vox Media and Polygon, there was never any dislike of the long-form work. In fact, quite the opposite, and it was part of the very early conversations. I remember a conversation that Chris Grant and I had in January of 2012… We knew that stuff was going to cost a lot of money and it was probably never going to make a lot of the money back, that it would be a loss leader and that we needed to do it anyway because we needed to be able to say that we were also taking time to write these long detailed stories about these meaningful things. There was an understanding, even with me and Brian Crecente that there was a symbiosis; you have to have the long-form stuff and the short turn-around stuff, and that neither one could exist without the other. That was always the plan. The actual desire for the long-form stuff came from the executives at Vox..
Chris Grant and I weren’t friends necessarily in real life, you know. We had probably spoken a few times. We weren’t enemies either, we just didn’t know each other that well. So it’s not like he asked me to be a part of Polygon because we were buddies. He asked me to be a part of Polygon because he knew that Polygon needed that long-form stuff and he appreciated my approach to that kind of work. What can I say about why they don’t do it anymore? There are forces at work even now with my laissez-faire attitude about talking about my experiences that I’m still reluctant to thumb my nose at… but you can put the pieces together and I’ll lay a few of the pieces out on the table.
You know, Vox Media was founded by Tyler Bleszinski, who created an outfit called Sports Blog Nation. Sports Blog Nation started The Verge to write about technology, and then they changed the name of the company to Vox Media to represent that it was now a corporation that now owned these two different outlets. And then they built Polygon to be the games outlet as part of that new empire. And then, for a certain time, the company didn’t expand any further — in fact we were told it wasn’t going to expand any further… and then it did.
They expanded by acquiring Racked, Eater, and Curbed – which is a fashion website, a food website, and a real estate website, respectively. And those websites were founded by Lockhart Steele, who is one of the co-founders of Gawker Media. And the acquisition occurred – and I’m laughing when I say acquisition because it was one of those weird stock transfer acquisitions, but the end result was that Lockhart ended up with a very high managerial position over editorial of the entire company. It was not terribly long after that many changes started to happen which included running people off like myself. Having not been in the boardroom for a lot of the conversations around that time at the management level of Vox, I can’t say exactly who did what or whose decision was what or why x, y, or z happened. But I can tell you that a lot of things changed at Vox, and specifically at Polygon, after Lockhart became in charge of editorial.
