Vulture.com will feature content from New York magazine writers and bloggers.Regular readers of New York magazine are familiar with its Approval Matrix, which is really more of a graph than a matrix. But that’s beside the point.
The matrix plots on X and Y axes pop culture happenings of the previous week, ranking them neatly into one of four quadrants: highbrow/brilliant; highbrow/despicable; lowbrow/despicable; or lowbrow/brilliant. It’s all on how much they offend or stimulate accepted standards of cultural decency.
A recent example: Mike Tyson’s comment that his biggest regret was not smoking marijuana with the rapper Tupac Shakur (lowbrow/brilliant). The editors assure that the rankings are highly scientific and mathematically verifiable.
New York is now taking that sensibility — something the magazine’s editor, Adam Moss, describes as equal parts comfort with culture high and low — and creating a new Web site, Vulture.com, that will serve as a home for criticism, commentary, news and aggregation from New York’s bloggers and critics. (Tagline: “Devouring culture.”)
The site is set to go live on Tuesday evening.
One of the first things that readers are bound to notice is the lack of the words “New York” in the Web site’s name. In fact, the home page of Vulture.com will bear just the slightest reference to its matron magazine and Web site, nymag.com, a clear reflection of the magazine’s goal of drawing in more readers and advertisers from the national market.
“While it still has a relationship with New York and New York magazine, it is its own thing,” Mr. Moss said in an interview from the magazine’s loftlike SoHo headquarters. He acknowledged what other publishers have found is a drawback for publications too closely identified with New York City: some readers find them too parochial.
“That’s true for some people. The New York sensibility is a plus for some and a minus for others,” Mr. Moss added. The magazine’s own market research has found, in fact, that some readers perceive New York as a regional brand, that region being the center of the universe.
Nymag.com already showcases the kinds of reviews, commentary and recaps that Vulture.com will host — much of it within a so-called Web vertical that is already called Vulture. Still, the separate identity did not come easily or freely. New York had to buy the name Vulture.com from a domain squatter and buy the trademark Vulture from an advertising agency.
The new site will break out the magazine’s articles and offer new content — a vast majority of it distinct from the material that runs in the magazine each week. New York magazine’s television, movie and theater critics will regularly write for Vulture. Its recaps for television shows like “Mad Men” and “Gossip Girl,” which have been one of nymag.com’s biggest draws, will appear there as well. Aggregated content will include an assortment of the latest viral videos.
Editors are also working on a feature they have code-named the Anticipation Index. In keeping with the magazine’s ethos — most elements of pop culture can be ranked in some quantifiable way — the new index will try to measure buzz about a coming event like a book or film release.
New York’s publisher, Lawrence C. Burstein, said the kinds of advertisers he hoped to attract with the site — luxury goods, beauty products, movie studios and television networks like Showtime, Bravo and HBO — were responding well so far.
The creation of Vulture.com represents another stride forward for a magazine that has had a remarkable amount of editorial success — and the accolades to match — in recent years. Mr. Moss has presided over something of a renaissance at the magazine since he took over in 2004, winning a total of 15 National Magazine awards.
So has all that attention translated into being profitable? Mr. Burstein pauses. Mr. Moss interjects, “We’re not,” he said. “We do expect to be profitable next year.” High or low?