Ezra Klein: evaluation

Transcript context

…Let me start with some questions about media. We’ll get to politics, you, and everything else, but different formats in media. So you can do something in print, you’ve been a blogger, you’ve been involved with periodicals, now you do Vox. Vox, to me, seems to be doing more and more video, so let’s start with video. When you use the medium of video, what is the bias in using video in terms of what kind of material, what kind of message? How does that slant what any site, but including Vox.com, is going to do and be? It is much more different than I believed it was let’s say two years ago. Before I came to Vox, I used to do a lot of cable news. I was a guest host on MSNBC. I came pretty close to taking a show at some point. You and I spoke during that period. One thing about cable news is it actually isn’t that different than writing. You are basically writing a script. There are elements, and there’s visual, but you are really writing a script, and you read it aloud. At least, I should say the way I did, it worked that way. When I started Vox, I had the great fortune to hire a guy named Joe Posner who I met at a media conference and struck me from the second I met him as a real video genius. The reason Vox’s video is great, and I have no compunction saying it’s great because I don’t have all that much to do with it, is because Joe, and Joss Fong, and the rest of that team, they really think about video as its own form in a very different way than I had before. We will be talking through stories, and I will come to them with something from the site that did really well. And I’ll say, “Hey, we should make a video out of this. Look how well it performed on the site.” They’ll say, “Nope. It’s not a visual topic.” In terms of the bias you’re talking about, the overwhelming bias in doing really good video work is stories that are fundamentally visual. A story that is two people talking to each other is not that interesting. I’ll actually give an example from podcasting. What we are doing right now is not interesting video. Early on in Vox, one of the first video series we launched was Vox Conversations. We had me interviewing people much as I do on my podcast, The Ezra Klein Show. We had me doing long-form interviews with people often for about an hour. We put them up, and they never really performed that well. The reason was it just wasn’t fundamentally visual, what we were doing. The thing that I have learned to take much more seriously than I did a year ago, two years ago, is that you actually have to begin by asking the question, “Why is this a good thing to watch,” as opposed to in print, which is, “Why is this story simply interesting?” To make this concrete, let’s say news media uses much more video five years from now than it does today. Let’s say Vox as well. What would be, say, three issues that people will care more about that they don’t care as much about today?…

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