Felix Salmon is a finance blogger for Reuters.

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.

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 Wonk Bubble Renaissance 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.

Once a publication has decided it wants to live and thrive on the web, it has to produce the kind of journalism that works best there. Which means funny GIFs of Toronto’s crack-addled mayor Rob Ford trying to throw a football, obviously. But it also means journalists using the art of the link to tie together the best thinking on any given subject—nearly all of which, these days, is available online.

Take Dylan Matthews’s tour de force “The Sequester: Absolutely everything you could possibly need to know, in one FAQ,” a Wonkblog post that could never work in any other medium. It’s too long, it’s larded up with charts and photos, it’s serious and irreverent and opinionated and service-y and insightful; crucially, it is the product of continuous updating, rather than something that needs to exist in its final form before it is first published. In short, it’s deeply web-native, and it’s the future of journalism. Being able to produce such material might not be sufficient for online success, but it sure is necessary: If you can’t succeed online doing the kind of stuff the web does best, then there’s not much hope for the rest of your operation.

The web also has the invaluable property that it has no particular need to target the lowest common denominator. If you’re running a TV or radio show, you need to ensure that your audience can understand everything you broadcast. Newspapers are similar: They don’t like to publish material that might be inaccessible to a substantial part of their readership. But online, your audience is shifting: The people reading one part of a website will often have very little overlap with those reading another part of the same website. The result is that people who are interested in the minutiae of policy can talk to each other without having to worry about, say, making up a reason why the “average reader” should care about such things. On the Internet, there’s no such thing as the “average reader.”

2. The more wonkery there is, the more valuable it becomes.

You open a small coffee shop, and it’s doing OK until a huge Starbucks opens right next door. You think your business is doomed—but, in fact, your revenues double overnight, and you end up making more money than ever. Wonkery is like the diamond stores on New York’s 47th Street: Each one makes money not despite the nearby competition, but because of it. Klein and Silver and Leonhardt are constantly congratulating each others’ new hires and witty insights on Twitter, and the congratulations are real: Supply creates its own demand, which creates more supply, and so on, in a virtuous cycle.

The Wonk Bubble is the best kind of cluster, a bit like Silicon Valley for technology, Boston for universities or Savile Row for suitmakers. As the best in the world cluster together, they up the game of all the players and help to create whole new economies. This started a few years ago in the economics blogosphere, as moderated by the University of Oregon’s Mark Thoma, when economics thinkers collectively realized that online debates could act a bit like fast and very smart graduate seminars. Now, wonderfully, it’s spreading to many more realms.

It also has the potential, now, to grow impressively. Back when wonkery was confined to the early-2000s blogosphere, it took real effort to seek it out, and the audience was primarily other bloggers. In the era of the social web, the potential audience for such material has grown by orders of magnitude—and, what’s more, it’s exactly the highly educated, affluent audience that advertisers crave. The biggest stars in this world—the Nate Silvers and Ezra Kleins—can deliver that audience at scale, and keep them coming back for more. As can the Washington Post and New York Times, whose brands are still much bigger and more powerful than any individual.

3. Wonkery expands the limits of the possible.

For decades, the news business has been constrained in ways both physical and conventional. There was a generally breathless emphasis on the new; there was deep belief in the virtues of objectivity and impartiality; and while journalists might have a deep knowledge of their beats, they left opinions in the mouths of quoted experts.

As these old verities erode, it’s the wonks who are at the forefront of creating a new type of journalism. Klein is unabashed when he says that his goal is to compete with Wikipedia more than the New York Times: The new is important only insofar as it is, well, important. The audience for such material is now sophisticated enough that it doesn’t want writers hiding behind other people’s opinions: Increasingly, we want our journalists to say what they think and be judged on it. And the New York Times has found itself lauded for publishing posts with sentences like this one from economist Paul Krugman, who has his own blog on NYTimes.com: “TT is the tradeoff between consumption and leisure for a representative worker, reflecting productivity, and the blue arc is an indifference curve representing tastes.” That kind of fare can now find its own audience online, without alienating readers who don’t understand it.

The new rules will end up touching all parts of all news organizations, but the revolution needs to start somewhere, and it’s pretty clear where that’s going to be. As such, the wonks both have a head start on the rest of the journalistic profession, and get to do a lot of the hard work of finding out what works and what doesn’t; what the new rules should be and how best to abide by them. Blazing trails is never cheap, but it does create a lot of value for everybody who’s going to come behind you.

4. Wonkery creates astonishing loyalty.

In an age where Facebook is everybody’s homepage, consumers of news have never been more promiscuous in their reading affections. They go wherever they’re sent; no one treats websites like they would a daily newspaper or newscast, as a one-stop place to get all the news of the day.

The result is that the new name of the game, in online news, is generating loyalty and repeat visitors—the people who come back regularly and avidly consume a massive proportion of your output. Individual bloggers discovered a decade ago that they had exactly such an audience; the Wonk Bubble essentially reflects a decision by big media organizations to seize upon that loyalty and create a product around it.

Why did so many media elites say that the Washington Post was making a big mistake in letting Klein leave? Because Wonkblog was the only thing they read and liked on the Post’s website: They had more loyalty to Klein’s little patch than they did to WashingtonPost.com writ large. Intuitively, they knew that in an increasingly fragmented media universe, products that inspire such loyalty are going to be worth their weight in gold—and that the resulting halo effect will make people (and, crucially, advertisers) think much more highly of the parent website, too.

In a way, BuzzFeed is following a similar playbook. BuzzFeed gets most of its traffic from quizzes and listicles—but it has also been spending a substantial sum of money to build a high-profile news organization, not to mention a puckishly impenetrable ideas vertical, promising “essays and articles that don’t mistake distance for objectivity.” Why? Because breaking news and making people think gives BuzzFeed the credibility it needs to charge premium rates from advertisers.

The wonks don’t need to pay for themselves through the pageviews they generate: Instead, they can pay for themselves if their existence attracts just a handful of big-name advertisers who can be persuaded to buy a much broader campaign across the site.

What’s more, wonkish journalism is actually surprisingly cheap. Wolff, looking at the salaries for the superstars, thinks that the ventures are doomed on the grounds that they are failing to “keep costs close to the bone.” (Not that he knows, actually, what kind of salaries are in reality being paid by the likes of Vox Media or FiveThirtyEight.) What he doesn’t mention is that in terms of the amount of content produced per person, wonkery is incredibly efficient. Because it draws parasitically on the journalism of everybody else, it generally requires much less time, and many fewer layers of editors, than most news stories do.

5. The Wonk Bubble is still pretty small.

The Wonk Bubble might be inflating pretty fast right now, but it’s still tiny in comparison to the news business as a whole, which means it could potentially keep on growing at this pace for quite a while. Wonk projects might cost millions of dollars to launch—but big newsrooms can spend hundreds of millions of dollars per year. And although star wonk-writers are increasingly expensive these days, they’re still much cheaper, in terms of dollars per word or article published, than star reporters who publish much less frequently. They also don’t tend to require things like expensive legal services, or war-zone precautions, or crazy photo budgets.

The wonk niche is getting lots of headlines right now, mainly because so many high-profile pundits are changing employers or starting new projects. But it is still a niche, and a pretty small one at that.

So, what happens now? If I had to guess, I’d say that history is likely to repeat itself—that the Wonk Bubble will play out much like the Blog Bubble. People got very excited about early blogs like Gawker and Talking Points Memo and showered them with praise and media attention. The mainstream media then took note, and it wasn’t long before every legacy media organization had a few blogs of its own. Blogs then continued to evolve, even as mainstream websites increasingly came to the realization that drawing a distinction between blogs and everything else was stupid and counterproductive. Eventually, a bloggy sensibility ended up permeating most of what is written online—and blogs themselves, as a separate and distinct product, largely died.

The same thing is likely to happen with the wonks. As the Wonk Bubble continues to grow, and online news organizations become more comfortable with this new form of journalism, you’ll increasingly find that the wonks’ journalistic techniques—the explainers, the charts, the accessible-yet-informed voice—will appear all over the news file. Eventually, a separate wonk site will feel as quaint as a separate blog site feels today. This is how journalism evolves nowadays. And it’s doing so at an all-in cost substantially lower than that of, say, the glossy business magazine I used to write for. This isn’t a bubble: It’s a bargain.