What Are Ezra Klein, His Posse, and Vox Media About to Try to Do?: Thursday Focus: February 6, 2014
As somebody-or-other I was talking to earlier this week said: “I used to read the NYT and the WSJ to figure out what had happened yesterday, the Economist to learn what had happened in the past two months on topics I wasn’t keeping always up to speed on, and the NYRB to get reasonably up-to-date in what had happened in the past year or five in A pretty random set of areas that I did not follow daily or monthly.”
“Then that strategy somehow broke down…”
Now comes the EzraPosse, the Juicebox-Mafia-that-was: now come Ezra Klein and Melissa Bell and Dylan Matthews and Matthew Yglesias to partner with Vox Media and launch us up to the next level of that great Algonquian Round Table in the Cloud that our public sphere has been ever since Tim Berners-Lee worked his magic at the start of the 1990s.
They say that the coming of the internet has made it very easy to connect readers with substantive experts, and very easy to write pieces of the right length to explain the news of the day in the appropriate context. But, they think, somehow we have failed to provide the audience with what they want or perhaps should want: inform us, and keep us informed.
As I envision what the JMTW should be doing, consider any news of the day. That news can be presented as a daily update: telling a reader who was up-to-date yesterday what has happened since. The news can be presented as a weekly update–a monthly update–a yearly update–or an update to someone coming at the issue de novo. All of those are audiences that should be served. And they all need to be served differently. Plus there is the ultimate “keep me informed” question: What do I really need to be kept informed at? If the JMTW and Vox Media can crack the problem of how to provide this kind of information, the kind that a really good personal special assistant smarter than you would provide, they will rule the twenty-first public sphere in a way not seen since the Tyrannosaurs walked the earth…
The intelligent and thoughtful Conor Friedersdorf has smart things to say: [How Will Ezra Klein’s ‘Project X’ Add Context to News?
The potential and pitfalls of an ambitious play for the future of digital journalism:]
Ezra Klein’s new journalistic venture, Project X, starts with the proposition that news organizations focus too much on what’s new and not enough on what’s important. Or so I gather from a nicely done New York profile by Benjamin Wallace:
During his eight years working in Washington, [Klein] had become convinced of a structural flaw in the way journalism is practiced—and he believed he might know how to do it better and very profitably. “We think there are a lot of ways in which the technology underlying journalism is reinforcing habits developed, and workflows developed, back when we were tied to killing trees and printing them out and having children deliver them to people,” he said. He then set forth a more general analysis of journalism. The column inches devoted to the new are column inches not given to the important, and this stress on novelty is a holdover from when the cost of making and moving paper limited what you could print. “The web explodes that constraint,” Klein said. “[Yet] we haven’t created a resource that people can really use. We’ve just created a resource where it’s really easy to come and find out what happened today.”
What will his alternative look like? A “21st Century encyclopedia” as much as a news site. “We want to think really hard about how to connect not just new information, but to bring it together with important contextual information to create a more thorough source and place to understand the world”….
Here’s what I’ll be wondering as Project X launches:
What role, if any, will narrative storytelling play?… The best piece of explanatory journalism ever produced, in the estimation of press critic Jay Rosen, is the This American Life episode, “The Giant Pool of Money.” It was, basically, an hour-long explainer of the subprime-mortgage crisis. “Going in to the program, I didn’t understand the mortgage mess one bit: subprime loans were ruining Wall Street firms? And I care because they are old, respected firms? That’s what I knew,” Rosen wrote. “Coming out of the program, I understood the complete scam: what happened, why it happened, and why I should care. I had a good sense of the motivations and situations of players all down the line. Civic mastery was mine over a complex story, dense with technical terms, unfolding on many fronts…” He wasn’t alone….
In what order should news be consumed?… In the normal hierarchy of journalistic achievement the most “basic” acts are reporting today’s news and providing current information…. We think of “analysis,” “interpretation,” and also “explanation” as higher order acts. They come after the news has been reported…. Wrong! There are some stories where until I grasp the whole I am unable to make sense of any part. Not only am I not a customer for news reports prior to that moment, but the very frequency of the updates alienates me from the providers of those updates because the news stream is adding daily to my feeling of being ill-informed, overwhelmed, out of the loop….
Will Project X try to provide the starting point, the “big picture,” and the most challenging and rewarding works of journalism? Or will it specialize in a particular stage of news consumption?….
How? Will Project X ever sell proprietary software?… Is there ever a downside to context?… Will Project X attempt the View from Nowhere?… How important is ideological diversity to management? Will employees be creating journalism as individuals with particular viewpoints, in the fashion that Matt Yglesias, to name one of them, has always done? Will Project X attempt an organizational voice with a viewpoint, like The Economist? Will it attempt a metro-newspaper-style “View from Nowhere”? How ideologically diverse is the readership that Project X hopes to attract? Is Klein’s existing audience “the base”? Insofar as a bigger audience is hoped for will it come from expanding ideologically, or to folks interested in subjects besides policy, or to a less elite audience? What will be the mix among analysis, commentary, and original reporting? And how about the mix among writing, graphics, video, and audio? How important is gender and racial diversity to management? As much as any blogger, Klein has experienced writing about politics as an outsider and an insider. Where is Project X going to position itself on that spectrum?…
Whatever happens, I’m curious to see it.