Thursday, January 02, 2014

Ezra Klein Is Said to Plan to Leave Washington Post

Any regular reader will know I'm constantly posting stuff from WonkBlog. It was started by Ezra Klein at the Washington Post and he grew it to a nice group of very knowledgable people with the ability to report on policies in depth. Now the New York Times reports Ezra Klein Is Said to Plan to Leave Washington Post.

"After consultation with the newspaper’s editor, Marty Baron, according to one of the people, he put forward a proposal with detailed revenue projections to build a new website dedicated to explanatory journalism on a wide range of topics beyond political policy. It would have been affiliated with The Post, the person said, but would have been a separate enterprise. The investment he sought, the person said, was in eight figures. Ms. Weymouth and the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, declined to support the project."

Eight figures is a lot but as near as I can tell WonkBlog is the most useful part of the Washington Post. It will be interesting to see if he spins it off. As the article points out, Nate Silver is spinning off 538 from the NYT (though it was independent before) and Walt Mossberg left AllThingsD at the WSJ to start Re/Code this week. They didn't mention Glenn Greenwald's new venture and I think Andrew Sullivan's The Dish is doing ok.

I know I'll be following Klein wherever he goes.

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