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. Budgets were restored for raises and promotions. A 2% 401(k) match was back on the table. The icing on the cake? A $1,000 end-of-year bonus for all.

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. Now the company is “emerging out of the year in a really strong position,” CEO Jim Bankoff tells me.

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. 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. Likewise, digital subscriptions within the New York magazine portfolio, which Vox Media acquired at the end of 2019, doubled in size. “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.”

In the gossipy and personality-driven journalism world, however, people have been gabbing about Vox Media lately for a different reason. Vox.com, the nearly seven-year-old website that bears the company’s name, just lost a good chunk of its top talent, the most notable resignation being that of Ezra Klein, a Vox cofounder and one of the most high-profile journalists at the company.

Klein is headed to The New York Times to embark on his next chapter as a podcaster and opinion columnist. 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. 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.)

Over the past 15 years, Vox Media has transformed from a niche sports-blogging network into a small empire of premium digital journalism outlets. Vox.com was hardly the first publication created or acquired by the company, which also owns SB Nation, The Verge, Eater, Recode, and Polygon. 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. 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. Vox’s access to the 44th president during the Barack Obama years didn’t hurt either. 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. (Of course, policy explainers and wonky interviews weren’t quite as hot in the chaos-heavy and scoop-driven Donald Trump era.)

In that sense, it’s hard not to view the Vox exodus as a loss for the website and Vox Media as a whole, even if publisher and Vox cofounder Melissa Bell had a more upbeat take in a memo to staff: “Vox is both strong and ready for another wild era of growth and change. We’re doing the best journalism we ever have, and doing it in more places, in more formats than ever before. There’s a slew of new projects and partnerships coming, and we have a stronger, more diversified business than ever before.” (The search for a new editor in chief is underway.)

From an outsider’s perspective—partially shaped by chats with insiders who admittedly share a certain Manhattan–centric view of the media—you might say Vox Media’s new center of gravity and prestige is New York magazine, with its deep bench of A-list writers and 52-year-history of influential narrative journalism. The magazine’s affiliated web brands, like The Cut, Vulture, and The Strategist, have become big shots in their own right, as well as the centerpiece of Vox Media’s digital-subscription strategy. New York also seems like a potential goldmine for the company’s rapidly growing and highly lucrative studio business, a comfortably eight-figure proposition that has already minted a hit Netflix series (Explained) and a multi-show Hulu deal for Eater starring celebrities like Chrissy Teigen, Maya Rudolph, and David Chang.

As one of my sources put it, “Vox Media’s comparables used to be BuzzFeed and Vice and those sorts of companies, and now because it has New York, it’s almost more comparable to something like The New York Times, making lots of different types of digital content that aligns with a well-known legacy brand.”

When we caught up on Wednesday, Bankoff politely tore apart my premise. “I understand why you might think in those terms coming from a culture like Condé Nast,” he said, “but we don’t operate that way here. I don’t operate that way.” (Condé Nast owns Vanity Fair, along with Vogue, The New Yorker, GQ, and numerous other titles.) “We are a company comprised of 13 editorial networks that are each performing at very high levels, and combined, their reach exceeds most other news-focused media companies, including Condé Nast, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. We are truly the only successful multi-property media company created in the digital era.” (Some of Bankoff’s competitors might beg to differ but we’ll leave it to them to slug it out.)

As for the Vox Media–New York mashup, “no other media merger has been remotely as successful,” Bankoff said. “A little over one year ago, you led your reporting with an anonymous quote of a New York mag employee saying, ‘We’re fucked.’ This time you are leading your reporting with a notion that New York is the crown jewel. Both sentiments seem to be off the mark.” (For the record, here’s the full flippant quote that someone at New York gave me on the morning the merger was announced: “I think the response to these kinds of things is always, We’re fucked, because long-term, we are always fucked.”)

To be fair, the New York gang was trepidatious at first. What would it mean to be subsumed by this younger digital company with its own culture and priorities and challenges? Would the print edition go away? Would the whole thing turn out to be a disaster?

None of those ominous hypotheticals has come to pass. New York got to keep its editor in chief, David Haskell, and its top brass, Pam Wasserstein, whose family has shepherded the publication for years. It got a shiny new headquarters (with better snacks, I’m told) down at Brookfield Place, even if some people lost their private offices or got squeezed into tighter quarters. Writers who had been on contract became full-time employees of Vox Media with salaries and benefits. The brand has, for the most part, been able to retain its autonomy within the new corporate hierarchy. Some writers have expressed concerns about Vox Media taking ownership of their I.P., but others see a net positive in the increasingly aggressive push to turn their work into movies and TV shows. (Leading that charge is Scoop Wasserstein, one of Pam’s siblings, who is mining New York’s archives for stories with scripted and documentary potential.) “I think Bankoff genuinely loves the magazine and the work that we do,” another source told me, with the caveat that the feeling is mutual “so long as Vox Media treats the writers who produce the stories as equal partners.” (New York magazine’s union ran a social media campaign this week to draw attention to its contract negotiations with management.)

New York has also added some ground to its turf. In April, Kara Swisher moved her Pivot podcast there, and the long-running real estate website Curbed recently joined the New York family as well. “Both of those properties had better audience alignment with New York, so we made the adjustment,” Bankoff told me. Regarding Vox.com, where the farewell drinks would be aplenty if gathering in a bar wasn’t a potentially life-threatening activity right now, Bankoff said, “I think the best editorial organizations are able to adapt and evolve with leadership changes. That was the case when David Haskell filled the pretty big shoes of Adam Moss at New York, and I certainly expect that will be the case at Vox as well.”

A couple of people told me that Bankoff has lately been likening Vox Media not to anyone from its peer group—whether you’d consider that BuzzFeed or Vice or even, say, Condé Nast—but rather to a titan in another league altogether: Disney. I asked him to walk me through the analogy.

“At the center, in their case, is an entertainment franchise, ranging from classic Disney characters to Pixar, to Star Wars to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, to 21st Century Fox franchises like The Simpsons,” said Bankoff. “We have our own franchises, which are Eater and The Strategist and The Cut and The Verge and SB Nation and so on. Disney makes money by bringing its properties to consumers in different ways. One way is a theme park where you can go on rides that bear the names of different franchises. Another is through filmed or theatrical entertainment. Then there are consumer products—you can buy hats and T-shirts with those characters. We have everything from programmatic advertising to podcasting, to creating TV shows to having a magazine, to affiliate e-commerce to subscriptions. So we have our own way of making money off our creative franchises.”

Does that mean Bankoff thinks Vox Media will be as formidable as Disney some day? “Disney has emerged over decades as a leader in its business,” he said. “Vox Media is a lot younger, but I think there are good parallels.”

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