Big Media Ezra

by digby

Congratulations to Ezra Klein, who announced today that he’ll be moving his blog to the Washington Post:

The news is true: On May 18th, I’ll be moving about two blocks east and two blocks south to the Washington Post‘s massive building. I will have part of a desk rather than much of an office. I will not have natural light. This blog, too, will change its home, moving to the “columnists and blogs” area of the Post‘s Business section. It will have a gray and white color scheme rather than a red one. It will have a .com address rather than a .org. For all that, the site won’t change much. As now, the core subject area will be domestic and economic policy issues. That means the financial crisis, health care policy, cap and trade, the budget, the congressional process, and all those other fine topics that let me deploy the charts and graphs I so adore. It will still have posts on, say, Clarissa’s little brother, and why people applaud at the opera, and what the tea parties means. That is to say, it will still have opinions and conclusions and reporting and emotion and concerns.

Ezra was the first fellow blogger I ever met personally. Being a fellow Los Angeleno, he had invited me to pitch a project to the LA Weekly with him and some others and we subsequently became pals. At the time he was a handsome, young whippersnapper (still is one, actually) at UCLA and blogging at Pandagon. As we all have seen, he’s since become a power-journalist in the young liberal DC establishment, bringing blogging and its somewhat irregular sensibilities along with him. It was only a matter of time before he moved into MSM blogging. And with this new hire, along with that of former TPM alum, Greg Sargent, the Post is showing they aren’t willing to go the way of the dinosaurs quite just yet. That’s good news for everyone.
Ezra is smart, dedicated and full of energy. He’s also an extremely sweet guy who has always been very kind and generous to me and this blog over the years. I couldn’t be happier for him.