Throughout my career, wherever I lived, I have subscribed to The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal as well as to the local newspaper(s): The Boston Globe, and then (since 1976) the Dallas Morning News and also the Times Herald (until December 8, 1991). I regret the decline in circulation and revenue of daily newspapers in recent years but understand that decline as well as the decline in sales of hardbound books and, in effect, the elimination of neighborhood book stores such as Taylor’s here in Dallas. What seems to lie ahead?

Here is a brief excerpt from an article by Leslie Kaufman for The New York Times. To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

Photo Credit: Daniel Rosenbaum for The New York Times

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WASHINGTON — Ask Ezra Klein what prompted him to leave a high-profile position at The Washington Post to start a new website, and the answer is a little wonkish, even for the founder of the newspaper’s Wonkblog, a mix of politics, economics and domestic policy that had become must reading in the Beltway.

It was, in essence, about content management systems, Mr. Klein said.

“We were badly held back not just by the technology, but by the culture of journalism,” he said of daily newspapers, as he offered a preview of his new site, Vox.com, which was introduced Sunday night.

While The Post is an excellent publication, he said, he felt that the conventions of newspaper print journalism in general, with its commitment to incremental daily coverage, were reflected in publishing systems, which need first and foremost to meet the needs of printing a daily paper. And he wanted to create something entirely new, which is why he and two Post colleagues ended up at Vox Media, a rising digital empire that includes sites like SB Nation and The Verge. Vox, he said, had the tools he was seeking.

“At our first meeting, we knew we were going here,” said Ezra Klein, who left The Washington Post to start and lead Vox.com.

Wonkblog, which will remain the property of The Post, had established Mr. Klein, 29, as a prominent voice in the capital, and was a formidable driver of traffic. So in January, when he and his colleagues announced they would join Vox Media with the aim of creating a site bigger and broader than Wonkblog, it seemed to be another watershed in the news business: a moment when young talent began demanding superior technology as the key to producing superior journalism.

Technology has become crucial to every newsroom, of course, but not all technology has been designed equally. News organizations born in the print era have generally knit together disparate systems over the years to produce websites that integrate graphics, social media and reader comments with various degrees of smoothness.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Leslie Kaufman is a reporter for The New York Times, covering digital media, who occasionally dabbles in the environment, dining, publishing, and other stuff. Contact her here.