Ezra Klein, the 29-year-old journalist who in a few short years rose to become the "prince of D.C. media" as the Washington Post's resident wonk, may leave the newspaper after it opted not to finance an ambitious new website tied to the company, according to the New York Times.
Klein reportedly sought an eight-figure investment to build a new site dedicated to "explanatory journalism" on subjects beyond his traditional economic policy beat. But his higher-ups — which include the Post's new owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — declined to back the project, and Klein is now shopping the idea around to other suitors.
The news sent ripples throughout the media universe, the latest evidence that venerable media institutions are becoming eclipsed by individuals who assiduously cultivate their personal brands and develop large followings. Klein's potential move raises a host of questions: Will readers continue to seek him out without the imprimatur of the Post? What would the struggling Post do without its popular wunderkind? Did Klein really ask Bezos to front him $10 million — or more?
A voluntary departure from a plum position at one of the nation's premier newspapers — unthinkable for a journalist, young or old, just a short while ago — at this point is merely part of an emerging trend. Journalists have long branded themselves — Hunter S. Thompson did it quite effectively decades ago — but with the rise of digital media, there is more space for creative journalists to expand beyond the confines of the hoary likes of Rolling Stone. And that's not to mention the prevalence of a host of free platforms like Twitter, where writers can get their message across with minimal infrastructure.
The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism identified this trend back in 2009 in its annual State of the News Media report, saying, "Power is shifting to the individual journalist and away, by degrees, from journalistic institutions."
"Through search, e-mail, blogs, social media and more, consumers are gravitating to the work of individual writers and voices, and away somewhat from institutional brand. Journalists who have left legacy news organizations are attracting funding to create their own websites… It would be a mistake to overstate the movement at this point. But for a few journalists at least, there are signs of a new prospect: Individual journalists, funded by a mix of sources, offering expert coverage to many places. [Pew]
That trend has only accelerated since then.
Consider Nate Silver, whose FiveThirtyEight blog was so successful that the New York Times brought it on board a few years ago. When the Times proved stifling, Silver jumped ship to launch an expanded version of FiveThirtyEight with the help of ESPN.
Silver took a few parting shots at the Times and the newspaper industry in general, saying its aversion to experimentation was a recipe for failure. He argued that the mentality was too often "we're going to run [the paper] as a non-profit, but we're in decline still because we're not being creative about how to create revenues and how to launch new products and take some chances and some risks."
Silver was only the latest high-profile journalist to strike out for an upstart venture.
Andrew Sullivan went solo last year after building a reputation at Time, the Atlantic, and the Daily Beast, saying that the "pretense of old media authority" had waned, and that he felt it necessary to "become totally independent of other media entities." His site brought in around $875,000 in its first year of operation thanks to a bevy of subscribers willing to pay an annual rate for access to his writing.
Then there's Glenn Greenwald of Edward Snowden fame, who announced in October he would be leaving The Guardian to start a new venture with the help of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. And this week, journalists Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, who helped build AllThingsD into a tech news destination under the auspices of News Corp., announced they would soon launch a new media company, Re/code.net.
Even Glenn Beck — to use the term "journalist" loosely — found a comfortable landing place after Fox News because he'd built such a large, devoted following.
In every case, journalists who had developed strong personal brands through traditional media sought out more freedom elsewhere. That's because while media institutions "can help build reputations and personal clout," as Capital New York's Nicole Levy wrote, "at the end of the day, the paper's brand is always the highest priority."
But it has yet to be proven that readers will flock, say, to Silver's stats-based style of journalism outside of an election year — and outside a destination site like the Times. It's hard to overemphasize the clout the Times and the Post bring to a writer's byline, helping turn an otherwise innocuous column about smoking weed, for example, into a viral sensation. And it should be kept in mind, too, that Bezos is no old-media luddite pining for the days of ink-stained fingers, and he clearly saw flaws with Klein's proposal.
Klein could wind up staying with the Post when all is said and done. But don't be surprised if he finds someone willing to finance his ambitious new site — at which point we'll see how far his wonk brand can really go.
