Ezra Klein is on his way out of the Washington Post, as Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon reported this morning. The Post‘s editors referred to Klein twice as a “wunderkind” in announcing his departure. His colleague Dylan Matthews only merited one wunderkind reference in that memo, but the Post, which reportedly turned down Klein’s pitch for a $10 million-plus site-within-a-site devoted to explanatory journalism, may find it misses Matthews’ KnowMore blog as much as Klein. Why? An October memo from Post publisher Katharine Weymouth explains:

For the third week of October — the third week of its existence — KnowMore was the No.1 most-read blog on all of washingtonpost.com. It is consistently in the top five. Single KnowMore items can do enormous traffic; one on the pope drew more than a million page views in two days.

Also departing for the new venture is the Post‘s director of platforms, Melissa Bell, who apparently isn’t a wunderkind in the eyes of the Post‘s editors, but who’s been running the paper’s blog strategy and helped get it running on WordPress.

The new site won’t be called Wonkblog, a name the Post owns.

Blingee by Jonathan L. Fischer