How Will Ezra Klein's 'Project X' Add Context to News?

[xchrom]

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/02/how-will-ezra-kleins-project-x-add-context-to-news/283568/




Ezra Klein's new journalistic venture, Project X, starts with the proposition that news organizations focus too much on what's new and not enough on what's important. Or so I gather from a nicely done New York profile by Benjamin Wallace:

During his eight years working in Washington, [Klein] had become convinced of a structural flaw in the way journalism is practiced—and he believed he might know how to do it better and very profitably. “We think there are a lot of ways in which the technology underlying journalism is reinforcing habits developed, and workflows developed, back when we were tied to killing trees and printing them out and having children deliver them to people,” he said. He then set forth a more general analysis of journalism. The column inches devoted to the new are column inches not given to the important, and this stress on novelty is a holdover from when the cost of making and moving paper limited what you could print. “The web explodes that constraint,” Klein said. "[Yet] we haven’t created a resource that people can really use. We’ve just created a resource where it’s really easy to come and find out what happened today.”

What will his alternative look like? A "21st Century encyclopedia" as much as a news site. "We want to think really hard about how to connect not just new information, but to bring it together with important contextual information to create a more thorough source and place to understand the world," Klein said. Project X isn't ready to reveal how it intends to better integrate context into the subjects that it intends to cover. But the team it has assembled and the buy-in from Vox Media suggests it has ideas. That excites me: I've been thinking about some of the problems that Klein identifies for a long time, and I don't quite know what to expect besides solutions I've never thought of before, which are the most fun to anticipate.

[Tanuki]

1. VOX Media! I'm glad I finally saw that in print. I heard someone on MSNBC mention it and

I misheard it as FOX media. I thought---Ezra Klein on Fox? WTF? Thanks for clearing that up!