Why Vertige Media Decided to Leave Wix
Wix helped us get off the ground. But as Vertige Media grew, so did the gap between our editorial ambitions and what our publishing platform could support. Technical limitations, dependence on proprietary software, ethical concerns: eventually, we decided to build our own tools.
There's something absurd about having to write custom code just to insert a “Related Reading” box into an article. Yet that's exactly where we ended up at Vertige Media: a little HTML, some CSS, an iframe (basic web code and an embedded frame, for the uninitiated), and crossed fingers that it would display properly on every screen. None of this was particularly difficult. But it summed up our relationship with our publishing platform. As our needs evolved, we spent more and more valuable time figuring out how to make our ideas fit into a system we didn't control.
The Limits of Convenience
To be fair to Wix, it served us well in the beginning. With no technical team and no dedicated budget, the platform gave us a simple, affordable way to launch. It made perfect sense at the time. But the tools that work for a new project aren't necessarily the ones it needs as it grows. As we introduced new editorial formats, an English-language edition, newsletters, and internal tools to manage our newsroom, every major improvement brought us back to the same questions: What will Wix let us do, and how much work will it take to get around its limitations?
This problem goes well beyond Wix. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms, which let customers use software hosted and maintained by an outside provider, come with a trade-off: convenience in exchange for less control over the underlying infrastructure. For a small newsroom, the benefits are substantial. But that convenience can also create a dependency that becomes especially apparent when it's time to switch providers.
Wix states in its documentation that websites built with its technology cannot simply be transferred to another hosting provider. The company also explains that articles cannot be exported directly to another publishing platform. That doesn't mean your content is trapped inside Wix. The platform provides an API, a programming interface that allows data to be retrieved, and that's exactly what we used.
Against the backdrop of the genocide in Gaza, continuing to pay the company also raised questions about whether that relationship was consistent with the values we stand for.
Through that API, we were able to automatically extract nearly 1,500 pieces of content. But getting the data out was only the beginning. We had to adapt the structure of our articles while preserving author information, metadata, translations, internal links, images, and the URLs where our stories were published. In effect, we had to rebuild the foundations of our entire editorial archive. It was a much bigger undertaking than simply giving the website a new look.
The distinction matters. Owning your content, being able to export it, and actually being free to move to another platform are three different things. For a news outlet, whose articles represent its daily work, its institutional memory, and much of what it has built over time, the ability to move that work elsewhere is anything but a minor technical concern.
Choosing Who We Depend On
Our decision to leave also has a political dimension, and we have no intention of hiding it behind purely technical arguments. Wix is an Israeli company headquartered in Tel Aviv. Against the backdrop of the genocide in Gaza, continuing to pay the company also raised questions about whether that relationship was consistent with the values we stand for.
Those concerns were further shaped by the case of Courtney Carey. In October 2023, Wix fired Carey, an employee at its Irish office, following social media posts expressing support for Palestinians. In July 2024, Ireland's Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) awarded her €35,000 in compensation for unfair dismissal, a finding Wix had acknowledged during the proceedings. The case also appears in the WRC's official report published in 2025.
This is not about equating a private company with the actions of a government or assigning responsibility where none has been established. But choosing which companies we do business with isn't necessarily a politically neutral decision. Those relationships raise legitimate ethical and political questions for an independent news organization, just as we scrutinize the economic and political decisions of the organizations we cover.
Because behind this technical migration lies a much bigger question about media independence.
That said, we're under no illusion that a small newsroom like ours can achieve complete digital independence. Our new infrastructure is hosted by OVH, and we still rely on various third-party software and services. We'll continue to depend on other companies, their infrastructure, and their decisions. The goal isn't to eliminate every dependency. It's to understand those dependencies, choose them deliberately, and retain the ability to walk away when necessary. That's the thinking behind our decision to build our own content management system, with a public-facing website separate from the tools we use internally. This setup should give us more freedom to develop new editorial formats, manage our French- and English-language publications more effectively, and maintain greater control over our editorial archive.
We also designed it with portability in mind. The objective is straightforward: if we ever need to switch hosting providers or publishing tools again, we shouldn't have to rebuild our entire archive from scratch. Of course, that's a technical goal we'll have to prove over time, not something we can guarantee simply because we own the code.
The Cost of Independence
That freedom comes at a price. Leaving an all-in-one platform means taking responsibility for maintenance, security, backups, and incident management. Technical problems we once left to our provider will now be ours to solve. And that responsibility will require time and expertise that, frankly, we'd sometimes rather devote to journalism. That's why we're not suggesting every newsroom should build its own platform. Ready-made solutions remain a sensible choice for many organizations, and Wix will probably continue to serve news outlets that have no desire to manage their own infrastructure. Our decision isn't a blueprint for everyone else. It's a trade-off that makes sense given where we are and what we're trying to build.
But it raises a broader question: how much control does a news organization need over its tools to protect its independence? Software doesn't directly dictate our editorial decisions. But what it allows us to do, what it prevents us from doing, and how easily we can leave it all help determine what we're able to publish. Having already examined our dependence on the algorithms that determine how information circulates, we felt it was equally important to question the tools we use to produce that information in the first place. Because behind this technical migration lies a much bigger question about media independence. We want to decide which stories we tell. But we also want to decide what formats we create, how we preserve our reporting, and how we make it available to readers. Having that freedom doesn't guarantee good journalism. It can, however, help create the conditions that make good journalism possible.
In a few days, we'll unveil the new Vertige Media website. We hope it will be faster, easier to navigate, and better suited to the way we work. For our readers, the change should also mean more accessible content and greater possibilities for how we tell our stories.
But perhaps the most important changes are the ones you won't see. We want our tools to grow alongside our ambitions, rather than having to scale back our ambitions to fit the tools we're using.
We're not leaving Wix because we've discovered some magic formula for independence. We're leaving because we'd rather have a say in which constraints we live with.
In the meantime, we invite you to subscribe to our newsletter, where we'll be sharing the latest developments at Vertige Media before anyone else.
