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I became aware that something was happening when Nate Silver decamped from the New York Times with his FiveThirtyEight blog to move to ESPN. ESPN, a Disney property, purchased the rights from Silver (the Times had only licensed the rights from the statistics savant). Subsequently, the Times announced that its Washington bureau chief, David Leonhardt, would be heading a new Times-owned website that would focus on politics and policy. And then came the big one: In January, rumors began circulating in the blogosphere that Ezra Klein, he of the Washington Post’s Wonkblog, had approached the Post  with a request for a reported-$10 million in funding to start a new website under the Post’s umbrella . When his request was denied, Klein soon announced he was leaving the Post to start Project X, an online journalistic website at Vox Media. He is teaming up with Matthew Yglesias of Slate.com and Melissa Bell, the Post’s former Director of Platforms. He has lured some of Wonkblog’s best- Dylan Matthews, Sarah Kliff and Evan Solstas among them- to his new venture. These developments begat a slew of tweets announcing new hires by these ventures and by other online and traditional media organizations as The Great Repositioning unfolded.

We are in the transitional stages of the disruption the Internet has visited upon the news and media worlds. The death knell of newspapers has been sounding for years and the delivery of entertainment content over the web, both via wired Internet and wireless to mobile devices, is becoming more and more prevalent. (Netflix reportedly consumes thirty-percent of Internet bandwidth during peak evening viewing hours.) While some lament the passing of the printed newspaper, other offer the opinion that journalism itself has never been so vibrant. Information and opinion- and, yes, disinformation, too- have never before been so accessible to so many people.

Ezra Klein has a definite vision of what the marriage of journalism and technology should be. He has publically described the Project X venture as more than a digital version of news delivery. He feels that the flexibility that the Internet offers journalism has not yet been exploited. As he puts it, “the focus is invariably on the new and not the important.” Wonkblog proved that in-depth and nuanced coverage of complex policy issues could attract readership. This type of informed discourse is easily achieved in a medium where you can link to other articles, embed video into a piece and even present comprehensive coverage of different points of view.

Whether or not these ventures- and the dozens of others out on the web such as BusinessInsider.com or buzzfeed.com- will be successful is a matter of time. The ability of the established journalistic enterprises like the Times or the Post to adjust to the digital climate will also be tested. It may very well be that Klein, Silver et al are the vanguard of an information migration. If so, they would be firmly planted in an American tradition that includes the settlers who crossed the continent in wagons.

Like them, I believe the Promised Land is ahead of us. I am in my sixties. I canceled home delivery of the Times years ago. I consume information (I no longer call it “the news”) online every day, visiting a variety of sites and following a number of journalists, public policy pros and sports and entertainment figures on Twitter. Television news- and I am not referring to the opinion programming that dominates Fox News or MSNBC- is laughably superficial and obsessed with the sensational and the tawdry.

Ezra Klein makes the point that the established news outlets have embraced the Digital Age by simply transferring their publishing models to websites. (Perhaps an apt comparison would be the written book and the audio book.) He and the others undertaking these new ventures are young and the Internet is native to their consumption of information. They are seeking to build on its technical possibilities.

I do not believe they are deserting a sinking ship, just a slower, lumbering one. Good writing is good writing, whether in print or online.