The Ringer Joins Vox Media’s Chorus

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of The Ringer on Vox Media’s publishing platform. This comes after the culmination of our major project to make our platform a place where media brands can be more efficiently designed, built, launched, maintained, and evolved. The launch will make it easier and more efficient for The Ringer’s journalists to reach the right audiences, at the right place, at the right time.

For the past few months, we’ve collaborated with The Ringer team to bring their content to life on our platform. You’ll see a brand new homepage tailored for different editorial scenarios, highlighted podcast and video content, new article and feature templates, and even some new typography!

Audience-first platform

All Vox Media brands, like SBNation, The Verge, Vox, and Eater share the same audience-centric core platform. That means that improvements for one brand can be leveraged across the entire platform. For The Ringer, it also means that they’ll benefit from the insights we’ve gained from each of our Vox Media brand launches.

One of these insights came when defining our core Homepage Product. We learned that our homepage audience is primarily comprised of a return audience that is looking for fresh content. Because of this, our Homepage Product enables fast discovery of new content and sends clear content signals about what’s new and what’s important. You’ll see this in practice on The Ringer’s new homepage.

he Ringer’s move to our technology platform also means their content will be available on Apple News, for the first time, because of Vox Media’s dedication to reaching audiences where they are.

Flexibility for editorial scenarios

Our platform allows for brand flexibility, both visually and editorially. In our kickoff meeting with The Ringer team, they told us they needed the ability to switch their homepage into different modes based on editorial scenarios: more dense for heavy news days and more open for typical days.

We designed two hero templates to help them accomplish these goals. Recap is a ten story hero for the busiest news day. It provides audiences with an at-a-glance view of everything that’s important for that day. We’re also displaying group tags for each story, as one of The Ringer’s goals was to highlight their key coverage areas. For less busy news days, we have a roomier five-up hero that contains more photography.

Our various story pages also allow The Ringer team to differentiate between quick news content and big features, and to customize the visual display of content based on the story’s imagery and tone.

Deeper engagement for video and podcasts

One of our goals with this redesign was to provide deeper engagement for podcast and video coverage. We’re introducing a new feature: The Podcast breaker, in order to drive audiences to The Ringer’s extensive podcast network. You can also watch The Ringer’s videos straight from their homepage on any device, as “playable video everywhere” was a primary goal of our new Homepage Product.

What’s Next?

Check out The Ringer’s new site here! As we focus on building and iterating on experiences our audiences love, The Ringer will also benefit from these changes, so stay tuned for more.