There’s a website called Vox, and I hate myself for using it as often as I do.

It represents the future of journalism—or at least, a future—as newspapers struggle to remain relevant in the digital age. It’s the brainchild of Ezra Klein, a former Washington Post columnist who was the editor of Wonkblog, an online branch of the Post that analyzes and explains complex political policy. 

Klein is the second case of the Post losing a key staffer(s) who go on to found a successful web-native outlet, the first being John F. Harris and Jim Vanderhei, the co-founders of Politico. 

Perhaps the biggest difference between these two stories, though, is the respective ages of the Post staff members turned entrepeneurs: Vanderhei and Harris are both in their forties. 

Ezra Klein is 29, and both his website and his reasons for creating it reflect a certain smugness that we digital natives don’t always like to acknowledge. Klein explained the idea behind Vox to a crowd at the University of California Los Angeles (his alma mater) in January: “We [Klein and his co-founders] think there are a lot of ways in which the technology underlying journalism is reinforcing habits developed and workflows developed, back when we were tied to killing trees and printing them out and having children deliver them to people.” 

The fundamental problem with current digital journalism, in Klein’s view, is that it is so focused on telling the reader what is new rather than stressing what is important. Since information posted on the Internet is permanently and easily accessible, Klein believes it is time for the news to stop caring about the breaking stories as much as the important context behind them, assuming that the reader will fill themself in on what’s actually new on their own.

This is Vox’s most prominent feature, and one of the reasons it’s so evilly effective. The best parts of the website are its “card stacks,” a system of current events flash cards designed to catch readers up on whatever are the most pressing issues of the moment. Across a few brief web pages, one can learn “everything you need to know about marijuana legalization,” or “everything you need to know about Obamacare.” It’s easy to skip around between whatever subtopics in these cards you’re catching up on. And when I’ve read card stacks on topics I’m familiar with, I’ve found they are thorough and mostly accurate. 

And the card stacks do fill a critical niche. As obvious as it is to say, the world is complicated,  and there are only so many topics one can actively follow. When something completely outside your purview is suddenly the big conversation worldwide, it’s nice to be able to let Vox catch you up on what you’ve missed. During the conflict in Gaza this summer, I found myself part of conversations about the minutia of borders and tunnel systems which I hadn’t even known existed. I had little prior knowledge of issues that were now central to a conflict that had the world’s eye, and I needed some background. So I spent an evening flipping through some online flash cards, and suddenly it all made sense.

But it made sense through a very specific lens. I understood the conflict as Vox’s editors and writers understood it and was being told the story as they wanted to tell it to me. Thus, my background was biased. When reading other card stacks on topics I know well, I’ve sometimes found certain information to be conspicuously absent and other topics heavily featured. This would be true, of course, of any informative source. Objectivity is impossible. But actual historians are accountable to other historians who peer review their work, ensuring that it is accurate. News organizations are only accountable to their readership and to whatever standards of journalistic objectivity they independently strive to follow. Vox seeks to be a sort of encyclopedia of news. To be the main source of background on any topic as controversial as the Israel-Palestinian conflict should theoretically require plenty of rigor and objectivity. Vox’s biggest problem though, and the problem with too much digital media in general, is that it wears its bias on its sleeve. More importantly, it makes almost no effort to distinguish its fact giving from its editorializing. 

Here are some sample Vox headlines. See if you can tell what’s news and what’s opinion: “Fear, not Ebola, is the biggest threat to West Africa’s fragile economies.” The article that follows is an interview transcript, but at first glance I was certain it was an op-ed. Here’s another one: “One study that illustrates how screwed up America’s approach to family life is.” Ostensibly, this is news, telling the reader about a new study into wage gaps between parents and non-parents. But the article itself only focuses on one element of the study to support the thesis of a later “What it means” sub-section. Not to mention, the headline itself (which ends on a preposition) has a built-in assumption that the reader believes American family life is significantly problematic. One last round: “Gamergate and the politicization of absolutely everything.” This is the one case where I’m fairly certain the article would traditionally be labeled an op-ed. The author brings evidence about how Americans self-identify as their political parties, and applies this psychology to the Gamergate controversy, saying that its advocates are mostly searching for an in-crowd to identify with. The one thing preventing this from being solidly labeled an opinion piece is that it was written by Vox Editor in Chief Klein. One key rule in most traditional newsrooms is that the editor in chief doesn’t give their opinion. If they did, how could anyone ever think that what they read is actually fact again?

But Vox has no such qualms. In fact, the line between opinion and fact at Vox is not only thin, it’s nonexistent. There is absolutely no sectional divide between opinion pieces and news on the website. Trying to categorize the objective and the subjective is made yet more difficult by the fact that it’s rare to find a Vox article that’s actually wholly an article. 

Many take the form of lists or graphs or even cartoons. A video titled “The 2014 midterms, explained in 8-bits” recently featured Klein talking about why Republicans have a chance to take back the Senate, intercut with arcade-style graphics. An elephant replaced Donkey Kong in the classic video game, tossing barrels, ironically, at a donkey. 

All of this makes Vox very consciously hip and deliberately millennial. But it comes at the cost of meaningful and truly informative content. Most “articles” aren’t more than five paragraphs long, using photos, graphics or pull-quotes to appear longer. And the aforementioned blending of news and opinion means everything Vox tells you must be taken with several fistfuls of salt. 

Yet, I find myself pulled back to the website again and again, to give myself background or look at their pretty graphics or, most often, due to a Vox headline that I just can’t not click on. They’ve learned from BuzzFeed and Upworthy well: make a headline enticing enough, and the traffic will flow. 

But if this is what journalism is going to look like in the future, we are in serious danger of losing our ability to stay truly informed—to separate the facts from our biases—and to have any issue hold our interest long enough to meaningfully address it. 

Either Vox shouldn’t label itself as a news website, or as a society, we should choose actively to not be suckered in by this and peer websites that have a deep understanding of how people think—or don’t—when browsing the web. I say we go for the latter, but that’s just my opinion.