A Letter from the Editor on the launch of The Codex

Burn it down and build it back up

Corey Long
The Codex
4 min readNov 2, 2016

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A year ago, I took the reigns of a stagnant site that had a good premise. Huge Nerd Network was a collection of fans, people who grew up with comics and toys but never actually “grew up”. I was intrigued enough by the potential that I decided to relaunch it with a few tweaks.

In short time, I was developing a website even though I never had. The site was made up of Youtubers, both semi-famous and not. The idea was to combine creators who all liked similar things but had strengths in certain verticals so that the site could cover all the bases. All your nerd base are belong to us.

I had been itching to write again, so I made an attempt to connect what was going to be my new personal blog to the Huge Nerd Network, which led me to feature writing on the site as well. The site launched and it was working for a bit, but it never quite felt right. The video creators made reviews and rants and skits while the writers tried to keep up in a similar way. We all felt bogged down and directionless, everyone wanted to do their own thing and none of it fit cohesively. We were attempting to be Uproxx, Youtube, and IGN mixed with the more editorial nature of Kotaku and Daring Fireball. It didn’t make sense.

My aim was to have a place for everything, but it wasn’t right. And the design of the site was tedious with a lot of admin work needed to keep the videos and articles equal. The site wasn’t SEO or social media friendly. The homepage was heavy and cluttered. We were relying on out-of-date and ugly advertising options. The maintence became more time-consuming than the actual content and everyone eventually burned out writing weekly reviews and quick hit pieces to try to attract clicks instead of more thought out editorial pieces that truly captured the spirit we all had.

This is all a long way of saying that the site didn’t work even though the idea was sound. All of those reasons are why I’ve started over and launched a new site here on Medium called The Codex.

The Codex will bring the editorial focus that we never achieved with Huge Nerd Network. It will still feature video, but as a supplement to the writing. It will still feature podcasts, but more focused and conversational instead of panel of people talking over each other and goofing around (the Nerdist podcast has that down!) The Codex will also expand coverage to whatever we want to talk about. Our nature is to talk about pop culture (specifically nerd culture), tech, and other geeky stuff. But we will also cover politics, lifestyle, music, and more. We aren’t going to limit ourselves. We also realized that our passion for writing came from our experiences. So we decided to focus not on delivering news, but delivering stories that capture why we react a certain way to media and events.

Why Medium? Well for one, creating and managing a site is a lot of work when it isn’t your full time job. As much as I love Wordpress, Medium is the perfect publishing tool for our mission, here’s why:

  1. The way news sites display ads is ugly, intrusive, and ruins the reader experience.
  2. The publication content is barely the focus and the site speed gets bogged down by all of the add-ons needed to make the site look good and earn money. Other studies show that if a site doesn’t load within 3 seconds, 40% of users will abandon the page.
  3. These days, most articles are accessed on mobile devices and social media, which means that the articles are accessed less through the actual website and more through shared links. Check out this piece on the newly relaunched The Verge to see where I’m talking about.
  4. The various publishing platforms all have somewhat steep learning curves for unexperienced contributors, while Medium allows you to write without much of a learning curve. Wordpress is easy to use, but Medium is easier to use.
  5. Managing contributors within a backend system is cumbersome, both for the editor and the writers. With Medium, it’s simply sign up and write and add to publication.
  6. The traditional way of managing comments and community forums does not promote much thoughtful discussion and instead promotes negativity and toxicty. On Medium, responses encourage thoughtful commentary instead and prevent trolls from spamming a comment section. Besides, readers always have the ability to respond to articles on social media.
  7. By the time this new venture would have enough traffic to actually drive some revenue, Medium will have figured out ways to compensate publications (hint: they already are). And we’ve created a well-thought out advertising and revenue model that we aim to follow.
  8. Creating our own site means we would have to try to build our own community. As much as I want our site to be a destination, it’s a big ask to get readers to add a site to their daily browsing. On Medium, we join an existing community of writers and thinkers.
  9. With Medium, we have built in mobile and tablet apps as well as a recognizable web presence. Less worry for me in regards to testing if our content looks good on mobile, tablet, desktop, large desktop, etc.
  10. Finally, Medium is an intellectual community. You come here to read thoughtful, smart, creative pieces of writing. We never aimed to be like a traditional publication, so it seems we fit right in here.

We are so excited for you to join us on our journey. I can’t wait to see all the stories we will tell.

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Corey Long
The Codex

Founder of The Codex (https://thecodex.io). Host of Decipher Podcast. Producer by trade. Writer/Observer by heart. I have a love for (too) many things.