Ezra Klein speaks about Vox and the media

Excerpts from an interview published Apr 11, 2014 at nymag.com titled Ezra Klein on Vox’s Launch, Media Condescension, and Competing With Wikipedia

Q: The cards have come in for a little bit of mockery already from media people — things like “What is marijuana?” and “What is the internet?” How do you decide where the line is for how basic these are going to get, in terms of subject matter?

EK: We want them very basic. I am ecstatic over that kind of mockery. If media professionals look at this and think, That’s ridiculous, I already know all of this, that’s wonderful for us. It’s great on two levels. One is that if we are not aiming beneath our colleagues’ knowledge level, we’re making a huge mistake. We’re leaving tons of readers behind. Two: The more folks in the media feel like it’s beneath them to answers questions like, “What is marijuana?” or “What is Ukraine?” the more we don’t have to compete with them. You don’t have to read everything; there’s a table of contents.

EK: A lot of the idea is that the card stacks add value to the news coverage. And the news coverage creates curiosity that leads people to the card stacks. The idea is that things work together rather than just trying to compete with Wikipedia or just trying to compete with news outlets. We have two products that help make the other one better.

Q: Can you explain — in the most concrete terms possible, like a Vox explainer — what’s so great about Chorus, the company’s content management system?

EK: I cannot. In part, because some of it is beyond me. We’re dealing with a really, really powerful technology for how to publish things. But more broadly because there are cool things that if Vox Media would like to reveal as a corporate matter, that should be up to them.

Q: Have you been surprised at all at the shift from hyping you and Nate Silver as saviors of journalism to trying take you down a peg now that you’re the bosses?

I’ve been on the internet for a little while now. I’ve seen this stuff come and go. My view on this stuff is that you’ve gotta step back a little bit and not get too hyped. There is a world in which we can launch and have a terrible reception from the media but end up being a wildly successful website. Think back a couple years to BuzzFeed, which was initially mocked. It’s a juggernaut right now.