New formats

An article is just a moment in your research. It’s centuries-old format and we think it’s time to come up with new formats to help people understand the bigger picture. That’s why we launched “Project 101,” a place where we can bring together the knowledge of different correspondents. For example, on the topic “poverty” we have correspondents writing about development, the social psychology of poverty, and ways to fix poverty. But they each write different articles about these topics, and we wanted a place where we could combine all of this knowledge into something like a crash course. Vox is also trying to do this, and I think it’s important because we shouldn’t just try to publish as many articles as possible, but instead focus on informing our readers in the best possible manner.

The books we’ve started to publish arose from the same question: “How can we inform our readers the best possible way?” Sometimes a correspondent has been researching a topic for years. A book is still the best medium to share this much knowledge, because it’s the only medium where people have the attention span for 50,000 words. But when thinking about books, I could see there was a lot of money in it, but that all that money went to external publishers, not back into the journalism itself. So we decided to try publishing ourselves (and, luckily, in the Netherlands there’s a central distribution system for books that makes publishing easier).

Our first book was called “Utopia for Realists.” We bought two printing presses, and started sending copies directly to our readers. Because we already reached so many people who were interested in what we write, they were also interested in our books. And we improved all kinds of things we didn’t like about the book industry. For example, our ebooks are way cheaper than print edition and there are no digital watermarks so you can easily share them with other friends. Now this is a successful branch within our company. We publish around four books every year, which have all become bestsellers. Of course, publishing requires a big investment upfront, but our books have been successful so far, and worth the investment every time.