As early as this week, Klein is expected to announce a new venture. Why the Post passed on Ezra Klein

The Washington Post would do anything for Ezra Klein. Well, almost anything.

For nearly five years, the Post has steered a bounty of financial resources to its star economics columnist and blogger. It has allowed him to have a contributor deal with MSNBC, a column with Bloomberg View, and to write long-form for The New Yorker. It has provided him with eight staffers to keep Wonkblog, his popular policy vertical, flowing with up-to-the-minute charts and analysis. The PR department has promoted him in profile upon profile.


But when Klein proposed the creation of an independent, explanatory journalism website — with more than three dozen staffers and a multiyear budget north of $10 million — the Post said enough is enough. Indeed, Jeff Bezos, the Post’s new owner, and Katharine Weymouth, its publisher, never even offered an alternative figure, sources familiar with the negotiations said.

( On media: Ezra Klein out at Washington Post)

Now, Klein is set to take his talents elsewhere. The Washington Post’s Wonkblog account tweeted the announcement Tuesday that he is leaving: “It’s official: Ezra is leaving the Post. Hoping for the best for him.”

As early as this week, Klein is expected to announce a new venture — described in a memo to Post staffers as a new “news organization” — that will look to staff more than 30 people on the editorial side alone. Meanwhile, the Post, which for four years has benefited immensely from housing the Ezra Klein brand — Wonkblog averages more than four million page-views a month — will lose its star columnist and its claim to some of the most widely read policy analysis on the Internet.

The split, which has become a point of tension in the newsroom and the talk of the town in Washington, underscores a larger tension in the era of personal-brand journalism. Big media institutions go to great lengths to feed the egos (and pockets) of their growing stars, cultivating their image and reaping the rewards of high traffic. But when that brand becomes too expensive, or so big it threatens to outshine the institution itself, the institution is forced to let it go.

Klein is only the latest marquee journalist to outgrow his organization and launch a new venture. Nate Silver, the star political statistician, left The New York Times last year to reboot his FiveThirtyEight enterprise in affiliation with ESPN. AllThingsD founders Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg left The Wall Street Journal to launch a new tech news site with the backing of NBC Universal. David Pogue, the former New York Times tech columnist, went to Yahoo, where he is spearheading a new tech vertical. Glenn Greenwald, the former Guardian journalist, launched First Look Media with the backing of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Andrew Sullivan, the blogger hosted first by The Atlantic and then The Daily Beast, is now funded directly by his readers.

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For Klein, the temptations of independence are as clear as the pitfalls. On the one hand, he’ll have more money, notoriety and editorial freedom, and, perhaps most appealingly, the opportunity to build a new business he can call his own. On the other, he’ll be threatened by the prospect of failure, of waking up one day without enough clicks and realizing he actually wasn’t bigger than The Washington Post. (Klein declined to be interviewed for this piece.)

It is a dilemma that many of Klein’s predecessors have struggled with: The appeal of freedom weighed against the safety and protection of a venerable news brand.

“I tossed and turned on this decision for months,” Pogue said of his decision to leave the Times for Yahoo. “The Times is the pinnacle of prestige, and I truly thought I’d be there until the day I croaked. But Yahoo offered the prospect of so many new creative outlets that I would never be able to develop on my own. … Ultimately, I couldn’t resist.”

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For the Post, like other publications before it, the decision is financial, media analysts said. In order to generate its own revenue, a Klein venture would likely require new ad revenue, subscription sales and events. But the Post is already heavily invested in building its core brand, which is The Washington Post. To take on Klein’s project would likely demand sacrifices elsewhere.

“It demonstrates that [Bezos] is indeed a capitalist. That is, he doesn’t see his Washington Post purchase as a philanthropic venture,” Bill Grueskin, dean of academic affairs and professor of professional practice at Columbia Journalism School, said. “It’s very hard to see how a Washington Post site could ever generate the kind of revenue that would meet, much less surpass, [a $10 million] expense base.”

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Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at The Poynter Institute, questioned whether the Washington Post would want to submit to a “star system” of young talent with a limited budget.

“Things are tight in the newsroom, so it’s kind of hard to look at laying off four five people so you can build up just one blog.”

Even if Bezos could have afforded to give Klein $10 million or more — the Amazon founder bought the paper for $250 million last year — the creation of a separate website was not seen as a wise investment for an organization that, for all its progress in the digital arena, still operates with relative caution.

“They’re not the most risk-taking organization,” Swisher, who offered advice to Klein during the negotiation process, said following initial reports of Klein’s impending departure. “It may just be a question of energy right now, they have to fix the main business. It may be taking their eye off the ball, or they may want to own it 100 percent, which was one of the issues we had with News Corp.”

“The Washington Post needs to focus on being The Washington Post,” a Post source said. “Now Ezra Klein can focus on being Ezra Klein.”

Some outside the Post, however, saw the decision to withhold funding for Klein as Bezos and Weymouth shooting themselves in the foot. In the wake of early reports about the Post’s decision to spurn Klein’s proposal, several journalists on Twitter noted a parallel between Klein’s departure and that of John Harris and Jim VandeHei — two former Post journalists who proposed a politics-driven media venture to their bosses but eventually left to launch POLITICO.

“It sounds like Ezra wanted WaPo to launch a non-WaPo venture, and maybe they didn’t think that’d be so valuable. But if they lose him it’s a big problem,” Joe Weisenthal, executive editor of Business Insider, said after the initial reports of Klein’s likely departure. “POLITICO took away their bread and butter of covering politics, but thanks to him they had policy. If they lose that too, they’re just a bunch of angry old columnists that people laugh at.”

Swisher echoed that sentiment: “I think in general I would bet with Ezra more than I wouldn’t. I would try innovative new things. I think the Post missed the boat on POLITICO, and long before that they missed the boat on AOL,” she said.

Defining the Post’s core mission will be a central challenge for Bezos and Weymouth, as well as for executive editor Martin Baron, who joined the Post from The Boston Globe in late 2012. On the day The New York Times reported on Klein’s impending departure, Post sources said the online political team would be staffing up in the weeks ahead with an eye toward the 2014 midterms and 2016 presidential election. But it remains to be seen whether the Post plans to eschew local news and go head to head with competitors on politics, focus its energy on big investigative enterprise stories, or pursue another strategy entirely.

Klein’s future, on the other hand, is clearer: When he leaves the Post, he will be following the path laid out by Silver, Swisher and Mossberg, Pogue, Greenwald, Sullivan, et al. Whether such moves will come to define the new era in media, or simply be a feature of it, is unclear. As Grueskin noted, there are only so many journalists of Klein’s stature.

“It’s important not to draw too broad a trend from this,” Grueskin said. “There aren’t that many Mossbergs, Swishers, Silvers or Sullivans in the journalism business — that is, people who have such surpassing brand-name recognition to command the dollars and audience that this move implies.”

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