Ezra Klein and Nate Silver have some things in common: They’re both smart, young, innovative and analytical journalists with devoted followings who, when offered the chance to launch their own ventures, left the nation’s leading newspapers to do so.
The similarities pretty much end there.
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When Klein announced he would be departing The Washington Post for a new venture with Vox Media, it was heralded as just the latest example of a brand-name star outgrowing a legacy media institution. Klein’s name was immediately lumped in with the likes of Silver, who took his popular FiveThirtyEight blog from The New York Times to ESPN, and Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, who moved their tech news vertical from The Wall Street Journal to NBC Universal.
But Ezra Klein is not Nate Silver, and Vox Media is not ESPN. And sweeping generalizations about the new wave of personal-brand journalism ignore the unique circumstances each of these journalists face when striking out on their own.
(Also on POLITICO: Why the Post passed on Ezra Klein)
The two men are friends and mutual fans — “Ezra and I have had several great conversations over the years. I consider him a friend, but I’m sure we’d hang out more often if we lived in the same city,” Silver told POLITICO. Silver, who came to political forecasting from baseball metrics, described himself as “a huge admirer of Ezra’s journalism.” Klein, who declined to comment for this piece, once praised Silver’s “innovations” as a journalist.
Here’s a look at the two and their differing projects:
The name
Klein, 29, and his wife, Annie Lowrey, of the Times, are, for a younger generation of Beltway insiders, Washington royalty. So when his intentions to leave the Post became known, it was all D.C. media types could talk about. And, to be sure, there was a devoted national following who knew Klein’s work — from the Post, from MSNBC, from Bloomberg View, or from his occasional New Yorker article — who were probably shocked to see a writer they loved leaving for a digital media company they’d probably never heard of. But outside those bubbles — what you might call Washington and greater Washington — few people cared.
(Also on POLITICO: Ezra Klein joins Vox Media)
Compare that with Silver, 36, who has become a household name in some quarters and is synonymous with the political forecasting industry. (Silver, who is gay — in 2012 he was named “Person of the Year” by Out Magazine — is not married.) In the 24 hours that followed the 2012 presidential election, sales of his book skyrocketed by 850-percent on Amazon.com. One week later, The Hollywood Reporter revealed that he was being courted by Tinseltown for “everything from box-office analysis to a correspondent gig on a television news program, not to mention radio shows and public speaking.” A week after that, President Obama dropped his name in a joke at the annual Thanksgiving turkey pardoning.
With his move to ESPN, a ratings giant, Silver’s star status only grows. He has and will continue to appear across the network’s programming. He’s been promised a role in the Oscars, which will air on ABC through at least 2020. Online, he will add to his reputation for political and sports forecasting by expanding into areas as diverse as economics, science, education and weather. (“I think people will be surprised at how small a percentage of our content is in the politics and policy realm. We’re still going to be forecasting elections,” he told POLITICO, “[b]ut politics might represent something like 20 or 25 percent of our total bandwidth.”)
The traffic
Klein was a big traffic-driver for the Post. In 2011, “Wonkblog” was the most-read blog on the paper’s website. In recent years, he’s generated what one Post staffer described to The New Republic as “enough traffic to end any argument with the senior editors.” (Sources put the number at well over 4 million pageviews a month, though that figure is disputed). Still, it’s a pittance compared to the numbers that Silver has put on the board. In the week before the 2012 presidential election, 71 percent of visitors to the Times’ politics section visited his “FiveThirtyEight” blog, according to The New Republic. On the day of the election, one-in-every-five readers on The Times site visited the blog. “What’s interesting is a lot of the traffic is coming just for Nate,” Jill Abramson, the executive editor of the Times, told TNR. (Neither Silver nor Klein will share their traffic numbers.)
(Also on POLITICO: 10 journalists to watch in 2014)
No matter how outsize one journalist becomes, he still benefits from his platform: Klein and Silver drove traffic to the Post and the Times, but the Post and the Times also drove traffic to Klein and Silver. At ESPN, Silver will be the beneficiary of a robust readership of sports fans. At Vox, Klein will largely be responsible for generating his own traffic. And it’s worth remembering that while Klein has many readers who follow him on Twitter and Facebook, there are others who will lose sight of him — much the way many of Frank Rich’s loyal readers stopped reading his columns when he jumped from the Times’ opinion pages to New York Magazine. (Still, it’s worth remembering that Klein is building an entirely new news venture — not just a larger version of Wonkblog — which means that past statistics aren’t necessarily the best indicator of future success.)
