Vox Media Acquires Open Source Response System Developer Talk

Vox Media, the owner of Polygon and The Verge, has bought The Coral Project from Mozilla. Talk, the developer’s response system, will remain open source and a standalone version will be released that includes paid services.

The media company reports that the six founders of The Coral Project are joining Vox Media. The exact amount Vox paid Mozilla for the platform is unknown. The first project that the Coral Project team will be working on under Vox is the saas version of Talk. This will be an expanded version of the response system and will include hosting and maintenance as part of the service. The saas version of Talk will be offered separately and in a bundle with the Chorus publishing service. No price ranges or release date have been announced yet.

Talk is used by approximately fifty sites and services in twelve different countries, including The Intercept and Nu.nl. It contains a suite of various tools for moderating the comments. For example, it uses algorithms that should help to recognize certain language use. Based on this, the software allows the response or forwards it first to an editor, who then checks the response.

The Coral Project started as a project of Mozilla, The New York Times and The Washington Post in 2015, before moving on to it itself in 2017. The platform was founded with the aim of giving journalists open source tools for communicating with their audience.