Ezra Klein Leaving Vox for The New York Times

Two high-profile leaders at Vox are leaving the digital news site, The Daily Beast has learned.

The New York Times will announce that Klein, who left The Washington Post in 2014 to launch Vox, will join the paper in the coming weeks, the Beast has confirmed. Vox Media publisher Melissa Bell also announced on Friday that Vox’s senior vice president and editor-in-chief Lauren Williams is also leaving the company to start a non-profit.

In a public memo, the Times announced the hiring and confirmed that Klein will serve as an opinion columnist and podcast host. “Ezra, in his columns and on his podcast, will be able to help our readers and listeners navigate the political future as Washington moves into a new era,” read the statement from interim editorial page editor Kathleen Kingsbury and the opinion page’s managing audio producer Paula Szuchman.

Klein was one of a handful of prolific writers who kicked off a wave of political blogging in the early aughts, eventually finding a home for his blog at The American Prospect and then moving it to the Post, where he wrote under the popular WonkBlog vertical.

After founding Vox, he served as editor-in-chief of the website until 2017, when he transitioned into an editor-at-large role while continuing to expand his work into other forms of media, including regular MSNBC appearances, several successful political podcasts, and executive producing Vox’s Netflix series Explained.

Klein is the second Vox co-founder to leave in recent weeks. Earlier this month, Matt Yglesias—also one of the original early-aughts bloggers and young pundits—announced he was leaving the digital media company to launch his own newsletter on the digital publishing platform Substack.