Afternoon Must-Read: Jay Rosen: “Keep Me Informed”

Jay Rosen: Keep me informed: parsing the logic of Ezra Klein’s move to Vox Media » Pressthink: “If you want to understand… look at these phrases from his announcement tour. They are all signaling the same thing: a shift from supply side logic in the production of news to demand-side: Keep me informed. Help me understand this. Don’t give me updates when you have them, but when I need them to stay on top of things. Missing background often prevents me from understanding the news; solve that problem for me and I will rely on you for my information. Here’s Klein:

New information is not always–and perhaps not even usually–the most important information for understanding a topic.

We are better than ever at telling people what’s happening, but not nearly good enough at giving them the crucial contextual information necessary to understand what’s happened. We treat the emphasis on the newness of information as an important virtue rather than a painful compromise.

The news business, however, is just a subset of the informing-our-audience business–and that’s the business we aim to be in.

The product is not “news” but understanding and that steady state of feeling well informed. The news system we have is simply not organized that way. And so it’s no surprise to me that Ezra Klein had to leave the Washington Post to find backers who understood what he wanted to do.