Michael Wolff — Ezra Klein, Glenn Greenwald and the odd rise of personal brand journalism

There is a new vision of journalism – call it the auteur school – in which the business shifts from being organized by institutions to being organized around individual journalists with discrete followings.

The latest development is the announcement by Ezra Klein that he will leave the Washington Post and is looking for investors to back him – with a reported eight figure investment (ie more than $10m!) – in an independent enterprise. Last week Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, who ran the Wall Street Journal tech conference AllThingsD, announced that, following the WSJ ending its relationship with them, they were setting up in business backed by NBC and other investors.

 Glenn Greenwald, who broke the NSA-Edward Snowden story for the Guardian, is the headliner in a new left-oriented journalism venture backed by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.

The former New York Times data wiz-kid, Nate Silver, has left the Times to set up a new site and vertical business under the auspice of ABC and its subsidiary ESPN. Andrew Sullivan, a blogger first at the Atlantic and then at the Daily Beast, may be the grandfather of the auteur school, leaving the Daily Beast a year ago to set up his own subscription site.
In fact, one might as well include here Tina Brown, who used the seemingly attractive economics of the web, along with her personal brand and the backing of Barry Diller, to claim journalistic independence with the Daily Beast – and in the process lost, I am reliably told, an astounding $100m.

And that leads to my cautionary question: is this all journalistic vanity and hubris, ending in certain tears, or is there plausible economic logic to individual journalistic fiefdoms?

The Raw Story
Ezra Klein, Glenn Greenwald and the odd rise of personal brand journalism
Michael Wolff, The Guardian