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Klein and Sarah Kliff, who decamped to the Times last year, questioned the former president on the nuts and bolts of health care policy shortly before he left office Obama also sat for a wide-ranging interview with Klein and Yglesias in 2015. Vox’s access to the 44th president during the Barack Obama years didn’t hurt either. It lifted off in 2014 with ample future-of-journalism buzz-“Here, Let Ezra Explain,” a New York magazine profile of Klein suggested-and a millennial-friendly approach to untangling the weeds of politics and policy. But in addition to being the company’s namesake, it is also arguably the title that put Vox Media on the map more than any other. Vox.com was hardly the first publication created or acquired by the company, which also owns SB Nation, The Verge, Eater, Recode, and Polygon.

Over the past 15 years, Vox Media has transformed from a niche sports-blogging network into a small empire of premium digital journalism outlets. Roberts told his more than 156,000 Twitter followers this week that he is “launching a newsletter called Volts, devoted to my twin passions: clean energy and politics.” Yglesias’s newsletter, “Slow Boring,” will “cover a range of political and policy topics.” (Yglesias will also continue to host his Vox podcast, The Weeds.) His departure was announced the same day as that of Vox editor in chief Lauren Williams, who is creating a nonprofit news outlet that will “provide high-quality civic journalism tailored to Black communities across the country.” Another cofounder and Vox star, veteran blogger Matthew Yglesias, left a few weeks ago for the warm embrace of Substack, which has also lured climate reporter David Roberts. Klein is headed to The New York Times to embark on his next chapter as a podcaster and opinion columnist. “This year’s not gonna be as strong as we anticipated before the pandemic,” said Bankoff, “but it’s definitely considerably more stable and stronger than we thought it could be in the depths of the second quarter.” Likewise, digital subscriptions within the New York magazine portfolio, which Vox Media acquired at the end of 2019, doubled in size. All those people shopping from home helped fuel the part of the business that makes money every time readers end up buying a product they clicked on from one of Vox Media’s websites. I couldn’t twist his arm into backing this up with numbers, but he said that apart from a general stabilization in the ad market, some segments of Vox Media actually grew amid COVID’s economic onslaught. Now the company is “emerging out of the year in a really strong position,” CEO Jim Bankoff tells me.

Vox Media, like many others, had endured months of painful downsizing and austerity measures as a result of the pandemic, which slashed its advertising revenues to the tune of 30% when the shit hit the fan this past spring. The icing on the cake? A $1,000 end-of-year bonus for all. Budgets were restored for raises and promotions. Last month, right before the physically distanced turkey smorgasbords and family Zoom soirees, Vox Media employees got a handful of things to be thankful for.