New York Times media columnist David Carr,
delving into why Ezra Klein could not find a home for his new venture at the Washington Post, cites Henry Blodget in a claim that digital media is different in kind from print media, and builds up to this:
Great digital journalists consume and produce content at the same time, constantly publishing what they are reading and hearing.
Klein himself, however,
describes the mission of the new venture as doing exactly the opposite:
Early last year, Melissa Bell,
Matt Yglesias and I began wrestling with a question that had bugged all
of us for a long time: why hadn't the Internet made the news better at
delivering crucial context alongside new information?
This year, we're founding a new publication at Vox Media in order to do something about it.
New information is not always —
and perhaps not even usually — the most important information for
understanding a topic. The overriding focus on the new made sense when
the dominant technology was newsprint: limited space forces hard
choices. You can't print a newspaper telling readers everything they
need to know about the world, day after day. But you can print a
newspaper telling them what they need to know about what happened on
Monday. The constraint of newness was crucial.
