If you want to understand Ezra Klein's departure from the Washington Post to Vox Media, as well as the context of the larger conversation about "the future of web journalism," this line from a recent interview is a good place to start:

I was intent on only partnering with somebody who could make the product better than I ever could. Otherwise we should just go the startup route... I trust them more than I trust myself or any of my team to build awesome tech and design teams and exquisite platforms. They really make us better on those dimensions from the beginning. We're building this from scratch and this will be a substantial effort and take many months but they've been thinking about it already they're making us smarter.

One way to interpret this statement is as a mere courtesy: Klein's proposal to the Post was made because he respects and admires the publication that helped make his name. Historically, the Post's relationship with the web has been a tumultuous one — until mid-2009, the company refused to house its print and digital staffers under the same roof, or even in the same state. Digital staffers worked in a separate building in Alexandria, Va.

Last year, Kara Swisher detailed the Post's disappointing relationship with the web in an open letter to Jeff Bezos:

Like a lot of newspapers, the Post soon got to the Web, too, but with offerings that were not as compelling as those being created by native Internet companies, and with a series of ever-changing business plans that only served to confuse readers. While it is easy to see the problems now, the truth is, it was also easy to see them then.

This is all to illustrate that the Post has never had deep roots in technology. It has tried, and had success with, various internet ventures — WaPo labs, an R&D style digital company inside the paper has hosted some forward thinkers in the field of media and technology — and has a large website. But all these are organs of the bigger thing, offshoots or subordinates of the media mothership.

So it makes sense that Katharine Weymouth would pass on Klein's venture, and explains why Jeff Bezos didn't even bother to reply to Klein's pitch, as a recent Washingtonian Magazine article revealed. Klein's new venture wasn't just about a starting a property outside the walls of the Post's brand; it was about finding new ways to present journalism for the web, which, translated into practical terms, means funding a tech startup. Those 30 requested staffers likely weren't just editorial, but product and sales staffers as well. People who could come in and build a new style of news product, who would bring a vision of their own to complement and sometimes overrule, at least on tech matters, whatever Klein has come up with already. It probably sounded like a startup pitch from a guy who's still looking for his other co-founder. It kind of was!

Most of the "future of media" columns this week, written largely by established, authoritative critics at legacy media properties, lacked crucial context. This is a crowd that deeply understands the players in and economics of the media business, but that privileges old media over new (or even just old-new over new-new). Today's most prominent media reporters watched and chronicled print's financial troubles and the rise of scrappy web ventures, and drew from their own experiences with both, documenting and living in an industry changing against its own will. It was a short, under-appreciated golden era of media reporting — immensely compelling writers finding themselves at the center of a fascinating and consuming story.

But media reporting today is, for better or for worse, inextricable from technology reporting. Tech — the internet, CMSes, distribution and production — is not just a factor for media companies, but an overwhelming context.

Here, for example, is George Packer writing for the New Yorker, addressing the technological component of Klein's new venture: