Ezra Klein: belief

Transcript context

…Getting back to you, you haven’t told us, what’s your key skill that makes you well suited for a leadership position, as you understand it? The set of things I’m good at doing — in terms of just coming up with ideas and creating content, I’ve been pretty good throughout my career, and hopefully continue to be, at seeing where the next thing is in media and what are the set of skills that you’re going to need to combine to get there. From blogging, and I think I was reasonably early on in figuring out how to merge a lot of new blogging with traditional journalism skills at the American Prospect. Brought that to the Washington Post and was able to figure out a way to build something out of that there. Saw some things in TV that you could probably do, taking some of the ethos of blogging, and what we were beginning to see, and what the audience was responding to, and taking that to cable news. I have been reasonably good at steering a course through a pretty rapidly changing media landscape. I don’t disagree, but it’s not somehow meta enough for what I’m asking. The Ezra Klein, what’s the thing about the Ezra Klein? I would say your key skill is self-learning. You’ve talked yourself about how as a student in school you were “at best, indifferent,” I think were your words. You’ve learned all these things on your own. You’re a very good self-learner. Maybe that’s the key meta skill that makes this work in the leadership position, or no?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.