Welcome to a New and Improved Ringer
This site has a new skin. And new tools. And in Vox Media, a new partner.
The things that go into making a website every day—nuts and bolts, requests and permissions, code and colorways—are more dull than most of us who work on the internet would like. But these things can always improve, and there can be good news. Today at The Ringer, we have good news, and that is because our site has a new home, hosted on Vox Media’s content management system, better known to those in the industry as Chorus. What does this mean for Ringer readers, listeners, and watchers? Not much, but also everything.
We have had a fun, strange, sometimes challenging, deeply rewarding first 14 months, and we’re grateful to the folks at Medium who helped The Ringer come to life last year. We wanted to come alive quickly after forming, and they made that possible in June 2016 (just in time for a historic NBA Finals). Now that we’re past the baby steps, we want to run. Working with the thoughtful, patient people at Vox has made our imaginations expand. What you see today is, as before, a website—but hopefully one that is a more readable, more navigable, better organized, and more coherent experience. This site is a passion for everyone employed here, and its usability is paramount. We want to keep growing, and to keep pushing ourselves to write and produce stories that are unique, irreverent, unbound by the conventions of the web’s worst practices, but also be pragmatic about how to have the most fun covering sports, pop culture, technology, food, Game of Thrones, the NBA, and yes, even politics. We think this new site will help us do just that.
So that will mean deeper dives into stranger worlds, with a palette that lets us stretch a bit more, thanks to Chorus. That could be found in short-form documentaries, breaking news, theme weeks, boisterous podcasting, celebrations, oral histories, absurdist fanfic, recaps, profiles, visually dynamic analyses, or your usual raft of essays. (This week, this perpetually depressed Jets fan is hate-editing stories for our Patriots Week package.) Practically, you'll see that our stories are more deftly organized, our categories clearer to discover, our podcasts collected and sorted to eliminate furious Googling, and our videos prominently displayed on our homepage (like, say, our Table Reads series, which kicks off today with Iman Shumpert—just click and watch). Plainly, this thing works better. We’re just getting a feel for the cockpit in this rocket ship, so bear with us as we clean up the inevitable mess that comes with a migration like this—if you see a flaw or a grainy image or a misplaced pullquote, we’ll get to it. And we’d love to hear from you about the changes: email us editors@theringer.com, or just tweet @ringer.
In the meantime, we hope you’ll continue to dig what we’re doing. I speak for Bill Simmons and all the writers, editors, and producers here when I say that we’re making this because it’s the stuff we love. We hope you love it, too.
Sean Fennessey
Editor-in-Chief
The Ringer
