America has reached a moment where the Right could make a credible effort at disrupting the dominance of institutions like the New York Times or the Washington Post. Unfortunately, one of the most prominent current examples of how this might be done comes from the Left instead. Based on press accounts, it appears that Ezra Klein’s “Project X” aspires to be not merely a bloated version of the Wonkblog he created for the Washington Post, but a more audacious effort to reinvent the structure of journalism for the internet age.
Consider the article as the dominant unit of traditional journalism. The article is typically based around the model of the inverted pyramid, presenting the news as layers of information in levels of novelty and import. Thus, the traditional news article presents the newest information in a lead paragraph, usually followed by a nut paragraph summarizing the importance of the news, usually followed by background information, explanation of controversies providing context to the story and so forth.
What Mr. Klein has realized is that article-based journalism is an artifact of pre-internet media, governed by the scarcity of space (newspapers, magazines) and time (radio, television). These forms of media are often forced to compromise, offering background or explanation which is insufficient to fully inform anyone new to a story, yet simplistic and not useful to those who have followed a story from its inception. Internet-based media lacks constraints on space and time and need not incorporate the weaknesses of these older forms. Rather, internet-based media can deconstruct the article into its component parts — new updates, nut paragraphs, backgrounders, explainers, etc. — to offer the audience as much or as little of a story as a member wants or needs.
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