Vox Media has bought New York Magazine in an all-share deal that brings the storied US publication, whose previous owners include Rupert Murdoch and the late banker Bruce Wasserstein, under the wing of a digital publisher.
Vox, which runs websites such as Recode and The Verge, and New York Media, the company behind the flagship magazine as well as sites including Vulture and Intelligencer, declined to disclose the terms of the transaction.
Pam Wasserstein, chief executive of the struggling New York Media group, said that during discussions with Vox’s Jim Bankoff it “quickly became clear that our companies pair incredibly well”.
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The deal will make Vox, which emerged from a group of sports fan sites in 2005, one of the leaders of a generation of digital media companies that expanded rapidly but have lately struggled to generate advertising revenue to match their ambitions.
Vox’s stable of websites specialise in subjects from gaming (Polygon) and interior design (Curbed) to the explanatory journalism of Ezra Klein’s Vox.com. Under Mr Bankoff, the group has grown its podcast, conferencing and video streaming businesses to help it reduce its reliance on advertising.
Vox, which made revenues of $185m last year, has raised more than $300m of funding, including a $200m investment from NBCUniversal in 2015 that valued the group at roughly $1bn.
Rather than seeing the merger as an opportunity for reducing costs, Vox and New York Media said the tie-up was aimed at building scale and breadth of revenue streams.
Launched in 1968, New York Magazine became a home for writers such as Jimmy Breslin and Tom Wolfe, who charted the human drama of America’s biggest city.
Wasserstein bought it from Mr Murdoch in 2004 and placed it in a family trust. Ms Wasserstein, his daughter, will remain at the combined group with responsibility for the New York Media publications.
