Journalist Ezra Klein is preparing to leave The Washington Post after his proposal to start a website within the company was rejected by owner Jeff Bezos and publisher Katharine Weymouth, according to a New York Times report.
The loss of Klein would represent the most high-profile departure since Amazon founder Bezos bought the paper for $250 million in August.
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Klein helms Wonkblog, a blog on the Post that publishes a mix of economics and policy analysis and has become one of the Post's flagship sections.
Wonkblog recently lost its economics editor Neil Irwin, who left to join a New York Times data-focused effort that began after Nate Silver took his FiveThirtyEight blog to ESPN.
Klein's proposal for a separate site affiliated with the Post would have put him in the same league as journalists like Silver and Bill Simmons, whose Grantland website falls under the ESPN banner.
The Times reports that Klein has explored private investment to begin a new site. In doing so, he would follow in the footsteps of Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, who recently launched a news tech site called Re/code, and Glenn Greenwald, who with the backing of eBay founder Pierre Omidayar, is building an independent media outlet.
Klein, 29, rose rapidly in policy and politics media circles as an influential voice, particularly within Washington, D.C. While his departure would be a major loss for the Post, the project that Klein proposed reportedly included an eight-figure budget. That price tag may be too steep for a newspaper that lost $54 million in 2012.
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