A first look at Ezra’s new venture:
I was going to try to write things that readers can understand, but I see those Vox wunderkinds beat me to the patent office.
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) March 9, 2014
Dan McLaughlin feels that Ezra may have made a mistake:
In Congressional debates and televised attack ads, it is a great asset to be able to cite The Washington Post; it is far less valuable to tell the voters in a district in Iowa or Colorado what Ezra Klein of Vox dot com thinks. And make no mistake: liberal though it is, the Post is a venerable Washington institution with deep ties to both sides of the aisle, and the institutional gravitas that comes of being a city’s leading daily newspaper for decades … For years, friends and I referred to Klein, only half-jokingly, as the future editor of the Washington Post; he has tossed that away in exchange for increased autonomy and perhaps an increased ability to turn a profit, but what he has lost will be very hard to replace.
I think that’s hooey – and more a function of the writer’s conservative longing for establishment cred than any insight into current media. I’m sorry, but the Washington Post name is as big a burden these days as it is an advantage. We’re in a moment when a new version of its previous authority could be created – and I think Ezra is smart to be focused on that, rather than trying to save another legacy media institution from growing irrelevance. Meanwhile, the NYT’s replacement for 538 is making progress:
“The Upshot.” That’s the name the New York Times is giving to its new data-driven venture, focused on politics, policy and economic analysis and designed to fill the void left by Nate Silver, the one-man traffic machine whose statistical approach to political reporting was a massive success.
David Leonhardt, the Times’ former Washington bureau chief, who is in charge of The Upshot, told Quartz that the new venture will have a dedicated staff of 15, including three full-time graphic journalists, and is on track for a launch this spring. “The idea behind the name is, we are trying to help readers get to the essence of issues and understand them in a contextual and conversational way,” Leonhardt says. “Obviously, we will be using data a lot to do that, not because data is some secret code, but because it’s a particularly effective way, when used in moderate doses, of explaining reality to people.”
The original 538 is relaunching next week:
We’re planning to relaunch FiveThirtyEight on March 17, a week from Monday. As with all plans, this one could go awry. We’re still completing final testing on the new website, and tweaking the final elements of the site’s design. But we estimate the probability of a March 17 launch at 90.617854%.
Heh – as we used to say in the olden days of the blogosphere. And good luck, Nate.
Earlier Dish on new media experiments here, here, and here. Dean Starkman took stock of things recently:
[H]ere’s what I see as the new [Future of News] consensus, or perhaps better, the Present of News (PON) consensus, since this looks like not so much as where we’re going as where we are:
Consensus #1: Free online news is a poor fit for legacy news organizations. Basically, the paywall side, the old guard, won this one. The New York Times digital subscription breakthrough in 2011 was initially dismissed as a unique case (just as the digital subscription success of The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times was similarly dismissed a few years earlier. But that argument has eroded as digital subscription meters have gone up successfully around the world. That variants of the model have been adopted by digitally native sites like Andrew Sullivan’s, Politico, and even Capital New York further illustrates that paywalls have turned some kind of corner.
The Dish 