Ezra Klein aims to fix the news
Just like the JournoList.
I realize most of you will not care about this, but the next big thing is Ezra Klein joining Vox Media (home of some high traffic sites) to start a new website somehow related to what we think of as news.
You can read the announcement. It’s very, what’s the word, oh yeah, hubris-ee.
Ezra, and sidekick Matthew Yglesias (of Sarah Palin target map fame), will create a website to explain what the news means, not just what the news is. In other words, more of the same, but on a higher tech platform.
But there was one sentence in the announcement that jumped out at me (emphasis added):
But we’re also hiring. If you share our passion for fixing the news, you should send us your resume here, and tell us how you want to help us do a better job informing our readers.
I think that’s a pretty revealing description, more revealing than Klein probably intended.
Fixing the news is what happened at the Journolist, run by Klein, when the mostly young and upcoming D.C. brat pack-ers strategized how they collectively should play events (such as attacks on Sarah Palin and Trig Palin) so as not to damage the Obama campaign:
The emerging picture of the Journolist is that it served as a place where like-minded people who had great influence on how the media portrayed events were able to coordinate their story lines for the benefit of the Obama campaign.
We saw the media bias on the surface; the Journolistas helped frame that bias below the surface.
Nothing has changed. Now it’s called fixing the news.
(Featured Image via NewsBusters)
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Comments
Their new slogan: All the news that is fit to be “fixed”.
I think there’s a bubble in punditry. HuffPo, Buzzfeed, Upworthy, Gawker, Business Insider have all created multi-millionaires. The irony is that Klein and Yglesias, two pseudo-socialists always opining about how unjust income inequality is while stoking hostility toward “the 1%” want to cash in on the punditry bubble. The beauty of free-enterprise.
What are they going to offer that you can’t get from Politico, Pro Publica, the new venture Glenn Greenwald is creating with the Pay Pal guy’s money? Plus, when Jeff Bezos acquired WaPo I figured he had a plan to completely revolutionize how news is gathered, distributed and consumed, using a model so new and unorthodox that none of us can even comprehend what his plans are.
Klein has a following. Maybe he’ll be successful. But it appears to me that he may be doing the equivalent of putting his life savings into NASDAQ in March 2000 or buying a house in Nevada at the peak of the housing bubble in late 2007.
Blah, blah, blah – the little shit still has acne. Who the hell cares what he’s gonna ‘fix.’
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