With this recent product that is also closely integrated with Vox properties, I'd say this is a deeply concerning move how closely the two are becoming entangled.
Indeed. Some creepy language on the Scroll site, e.g. “With Scroll, journalists get paid to report the stories important to democracy [...]”
These Vox-alikes seem to fancy themselves arbiters of meaning with regard to “journalism” and “democracy”. Anything which disagrees with their personal definitions must be “alt-right”...
It writes: "After 3.5 years at Mozilla, the time is right for Coral software to move further into the journalism space, and grow with the support of an organization grounded in that industry", and "... The Coral Project will receive the backing of a large company ...". — However, Vox could back the project, also if it was still led my Mozilla, right. Still unclear to me why Mozilla didn't want to continue leading the project? Maybe Talk was too different from other things Mozilla does, and maybe it cost money and didn't bring any revenue?
I don't really have inside knowledge, but I think if the opportunity comes to graduate a project to external management and resourcing the Mozilla Foundation is probably going to take it. Quite a few projects are managed by Mozilla Foundation but receive very substantive external funding, and I think that was the case for Coral. That grant-based funding is often time limited and requires a bunch of hustling, so having a long-term committed sponsor would be attractive.
Or maybe Mozilla wanted to free those resources to work on other things? The project got to "good enough" state and they started looking for a new maintainer?
With this recent product that is also closely integrated with Vox properties, I'd say this is a deeply concerning move how closely the two are becoming entangled.