Why the boom in data journalism actually makes sense.
Call it the Wonk Bubble. If you’re in the market for serious, empirical, quantitative analysis of national policy—or of just about anything else in the news these days—the East Coast Media Elite has you covered like never before.HT: MoneyBeat
The Washington Post has Wonkblog, and its Facebook-optimized cousin Know More, and will shortly unveil a “storytelling and policy” project to be run by economics policy correspondent Jim Tankersley. Meanwhile, a large number of Wonkblog and Know More alumni, led by former Wonkblogger-in-chief Ezra Klein, just launched Vox.com, a much more ambitious (if not yet fully formed) website seeking to explain the world in a truly web-native manner.
Something similar happened at the New York Times after data wunderkind Nate Silver left for the greener pastures of ABC and ESPN. His shiny new FiveThirtyEight.com launched in March; The Upshot, David Leonhardt’s project at the Times, arrives hot on its heels and features top-shelf academics like Michael Beschloss, Sendhil Mullainathan and Justin Wolfers—along with many of the paper’s best editors, statisticians and data-visualization pros.
And that’s just the big, headline-grabbing sites. Lots of other media organizations are moving in a similar direction: The New Republic, for instance, is building a new site-within-a-site to be run by health policy writer Jonathan Cohn; New York will launch a social science vertical under Jesse Singal; and “creative class” theorist Richard Florida’s urban-policy site, the Atlantic Cities, has been operating now for well over two years. The space they’re entering is hardly terra incognita, either: Focused, wonkish publications like Foreign Policy and National Journal have quietly been doing sterling work along similar lines for years.
All of these properties, to a greater or lesser extent, claim to be in it for the money: They’re for-profit entities that see real financial value in providing accessible wonkery to the online masses. But is that really credible? Is there any realistic hope that the tens of millions of dollars being poured into these sites will ever pay real dividends for the media companies hiring all these eggheads? Or is the Wonk Bubble just the latest bandwagon, an act of desperation from fearful executives who don’t want to seem behind the curve and who have no real idea what they’re doing?
One thing is certain: Not all of these projects will make money. (This is the media business, after all.) Media critic Michael Wolff argues that most of these ventures will fail because “you can lose amounts of money in digital journalism that might make even the most devoted backer choke—and close you.” But there’s actually more here than the skeptics might think.
Herewith, then, The Top Five Reasons Why The WonkBubbleRenaissance Makes Sense:
1. The web requires web-native journalism.
Radio news and TV news and newspaper news and magazine news differ not only in the obvious respects. They’re good at different things. Want to watch a politician squirm and try to avoid answering a pointed question? Only television can do that. A compelling individual narrative? Radio is peerless. A highly complex, months-long international investigation? Get thee to a newspaper. Fast, accurate explanation and analysis of current policy debates? The web is for you. It has speed, of course, and the ability to embed easily any kind of chart you like, but most importantly the web has the hyperlink, the lifeblood of the kind of free-flowing intellectual conversation all the wonks are after....MORE
