The rumors were true: Ezra Klein, the creator of the Washington Post’s Wonkblog, is leaving the paper to start a new venture with a couple of his colleagues. In my bit of the Twitterverse, the general reaction appears to be that Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Post, made a huge mistake in letting Klein go. “Insane failure to keep an asset,” Thomas Edsall, the former Post writer, tweeted. “Ezra Klein leaves the Washington Post. Last shred of Post relevance leaves, too,” added Bruce Bartlett, the former Reagan Administration official.
Such reactions are understandable. Klein is a widely admired and highly productive blogger, columnist, and television talking head. (In one of his many incarnations, he has penned several smart essays for The New Yorker.) He also has a shrewd understanding of how online media works. In Wonkblog, he created a comprehensive, timely, and informative blog that serves as an invaluable resource to many people interested in Washington policy issues, myself included.
Any media organization would surely have wanted to keep hold of such a gifted and hard-working staffer, especially one who was threatening to take with him at least two other talented and energetic individuals: Melissa Bell, the Post’s “director of platforms,” and Dylan Matthews, a young Wonkblog writer who recently launched a sister site, Know More. At the Post, the pressure to retain online talent is especially strong because of the Politico precedent. About eight years ago, two Post reporters, John Harris and Jim VandeHei, proposed a new media venture to the paper’s brass, got turned down, and left to launch Politico. (A Slate headline on Tuesday read, in part, “Washington Wonders Whether the Post Ever Learns Anything.”)
The critics may be right, but it may also be worth trying to look at things from the perspective of Bezos and the Post’s management. A strong argument can be made that, rather than diverting money to a new news venture, the Post needs to invest in its existing one, which has seen its budget cut steadily during the past few years. Since Bezos took charge last year, the Post has made a few moves, adding staff to its political blog, for instance. But if it wants to catch up with rivals like the Times and Politico, there’s a long way to go.
For the Post, the key question must have been whether funding Klein’s vision of expanding Wonkblog’s explanatory journalism to other areas fit in with its own plans, or whether backing it would be a costly diversion. Klein isn’t talking publicly, but Politico’s Dylan Byers reported that his new venture would have “more than three dozen staffers and a multiyear budget north of $10 million.” Its planned ownership structure hasn’t been disclosed. (I heard that the negotiations between Klein and the Post didn’t even get that far.) But, in a statement announcing Klein’s departure, the paper made it clear that he was intent on going well beyond expanding his existing franchise within the Post: “He is looking to start his own news organization.”
Assuming that this is right, and that the Post was essentially being asked to finance a new media company—one that in some areas would compete with its own journalism—the issue largely comes down to economics: did Klein’s proposal make economic sense? Because I haven’t seen it, I don’t know the answer. But we do know a bit about the economics of news sites in general.
Until now, the successful “verticals” associated with newspapers have mostly been devoted to narrow areas. Wonkblog covers economic policy and its offshoots. The Times’s Dealbook covers Wall Street. The Financial Times’ Alphaville covers global investing. I look at all of them and learn a good deal by doing so. But their success, and their potential as free-standing businesses, shouldn’t be exaggerated. According to Politico’s Byers, Wonkblog gets more than four million page views a month. Traditionally, the Post’s site has been free: its main source of revenue is advertising. To be on the safe side, let’s say that it gets five million page views a month, and its over-all revenue per thousand pages viewed is twenty dollars—a number that is broadly in line with those of other successful Web sites. (Here I am combining the C.P.M.—the cost per thousand views for individual ads—and making an adjustment for unsold inventory.) That translates into revenues of a hundred thousand dollars per month, or $1.2 million a year.
To be sure, that figure may underestimate the site’s over-all revenues. My page-view and C.P.M. figures may be too low. And, in addition to selling display advertising, sites can raise real money by partnering with corporate sponsors, organizing conferences, and the like. But whatever tactics they employ, the economics of stand-alone news Web sites are forbidding. Unless they generate a very large number of page views, it’s hard for them to generate a lot of revenue.
How tough is it to succeed on a bigger scale? Let’s say that you wanted to generate enough money to cover a budget of five million dollars per year, which may be the sort of figure that Klein is looking to work toward. Assuming that you could earn twenty dollars in ad revenues per thousand page views, which wouldn’t be easy for a new site, you would need to get about two hundred and fifty million page views a year. That is about twenty-one million page views a month—more than four times the number that Wonkblog currently receives.
Now, hitting such a target isn’t out of the question. Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall’s politics outfit, gets twenty-two million page views per month, it reports. Henry Blodget’s Business Insider gets a lot more than that. And popular sites aimed explicitly at social media, such as BuzzFeed and Upworthy, have shown that it is possible to generate a huge number of page views, and to do it pretty quickly.
Still, a note of caution is justified. TPM and Business Insider are both narrowly focused sites: Klein’s new venture is reportedly aiming to go broader. BuzzFeed and Upworthy aren’t really news sites: they specialize in listicles, lifestyle posts, funny GIFs, and celebrity stories. When I checked BuzzFeed’s home page on Monday afternoon, one of its featured headlines was “Ron Jeremy Does ‘Wrecking Ball.’ ” Over at Upworthy, there was this offering: “An Actor Who Got Super Famous Overnight Has Some Profound Thoughts on Celebrity Worship.” (Update: In fairness, and in response to some complaints from BuzzFeed writers, I should point out that BuzzFeed also puts out serious journalism, including political reports, dispatches from overseas, and long-form stories. Still, the lists and other lighter fare are what drive a lot of its traffic.)
It seems unlikely that Klein’s new site will be running stories about aging porn stars singing Miley Cyrus songs. So how do you use Facebook and Twitter to drive large numbers of people to thoughtful posts about Obamacare or the war in Syria? Actually, Klein and Matthews have some experience in this area. Know More, the “viral-friendly portal” (BuzzFeed’s description) that Klein conceived and Matthews launched, in October, made a bit of a splash. “On some days … [it] draws more traffic than Wonkblog,” according to a leaked internal memo from Katharine Weymouth, the Post’s publisher.
Last month, in a post discussing Know More’s success, Klein noted that content designed specifically for social media, especially Facebook, can “drive vastly more traffic than ever seemed possible …. Publishers need to spend a lot more time thinking about how to package non-social content to give it the best chance on the social Web.” Among the tactics that Klein recommended: routinely creating video promos to accompany significant articles, and “identifying key social accounts in the communities that might be interested in a given story and pushing to them directly.” “It would sure be a convenient coincidence if the form journalists used on newsprint also happened to be the best way to reach readers on Facebook,” Klein wrote. “Sadly, it doesn’t appear to be true.”
Ultimately, then, Klein’s new venture may be as much about promoting and delivering interesting content as creating it. That will make it intriguing to watch, but not necessarily any less risky—or any less of a competitive threat to the Post, should it succeed. If I had the resources of Bezos, I think I would have taken the plunge and backed Klein’s ambitions, but I can understand why he didn’t. He spent two hundred and fifty million dollars on the Post—a large sum, even to him, and the primary challenge is to leverage and expand the content it already produces. Among other things, it needs to protect the Wonkblog franchise that Klein created and replicate it in other areas, particularly politics, where it has ceded far too much ground to Politico.
If Klein could have been persuaded to stay and help lead this effort, letting him go was a bad decision. But if he was determined to run his own show, on his own terms, both sides may have done the right thing. With Klein’s record, he shouldn’t have much trouble finding alternate sources of finance. (And good luck to him!) Bezos, by taking the money he has saved and plowing it into the Post’s journalism, can show he is serious about rejuvenating the paper. For example: what about radically expanding and consolidating the paper’s political coverage, rebranding it, and giving Politico a real run for its money? Doing something like that would send a signal to the paper’s readers, and its staff, that letting Klein leave wasn’t just a cheapskate move, or another instance of the Post failing to learn from history, but was part of a viable long-term strategy.
Over to you, Jeff.
Photograph of Ezra Klein by Matt Roth/The New York Times/Redux.
