Michael Kinsley Has a Bone to Pick With Vox

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Today’s worst person of the first 15 minutes of the morning is Michael Kinsley, who has some bones to pick with modern internet journalism, pioneered by people he calls “Ezras,” after Ezra Klein, founder of Vox. Here’s a sample:

An Ezra also will shuffle the deck and summarize ruthlessly. This seems to be an inherent tendency of the Web: the search for ways to put the news, and analysis of the news, in some kind of new order—something more satisfying than the random cacophony and confusion you must plow through today if you want to pass yourself off as well informed. But there are so many Web sites summarizing and shuffling that in fact you feel you are falling ever farther behind. This process of summarizing and shuffling is called “aggregation.”

….The fancier term is “curation.”…Some folks have yet another word for aggregation and related activities on the Web. They call it “plagiarism.”

Et cetera. You may rest assured that the internet is not letting this pass unnoticed. And truthfully, the whole thing does seem kind of silly. Kinsley admits that garden variety journalism has some problems (faux objectivity, fear of math, and so forth), but then criticizes Vox-style journalism for—what? Trying to make sense of complex subjects? That’s what all journalism does. Doing research as well as reporting? That’s what all good journalism does. Sometimes writing trivial pieces? If that were a firing offense, there wouldn’t be any journalism at all.

So I guess I don’t know what Kinsley’s real problem is. Vox-style journalism does rely more on research than traditional journalism, and it does illustrate its stories with more charts than traditional journalism. And I’ll confess that even as a chart addict myself, I think this can go too far. I usually scroll quickly by when I see a headline like “23 charts that explain the rise of ISIS.” Even chart addicts have their limits, and sometimes charts can impose a simplicity on a subject that doesn’t actually exist. Still, this is a minor complaint.

Personally, I think that if Vox has any problems, it’s with their favorite headlines. For example:

  • 7 winners and losers from….
  • ….explained
  • ….in 3 charts

However, even the Voxers seem to have realized that this stuff was getting out of hand, and they’ve cut back on these and other overused headlines. So, really, there’s hardly anything left to complain about aside from the lack of cats.

But here’s what I think might have been bothering Kinsley, which he either didn’t quite know or wasn’t quite willing to say out loud: Vox and similar sites appeal to people with a different esthetic than, say, readers of the New York Times. It appeals to people who aren’t afraid of numbers. It appeals to people who think reporting is just one tool of journalism, and maybe not even the most important one. It appeals to people who don’t mind journalism with a point of view (though I’ll concede that I don’t think Vox has found quite the right balance here). In other words, it’s built on top of the nerdy, wonky esthetic that built the internet. That esthetic doesn’t appeal to everyone, especially those who aren’t especially nerdy or wonky themselves. I suspect it doesn’t appeal to Kinsley.

But then again, the esthetic of Car & Driver might not appeal to him either. That’s because it’s aimed at a particular subset of the reading world. No one thinks that’s a problem, so what’s wrong with a more general-purpose news site that also appeals to a particular subset of the reading world? Beats me.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate