Matt Yglesias Kicks Off Vox.com with Rewrite of His Own Old Article

Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein famously teamed up to offer the world  “explanatory journalism.” In Yglesias’s case, it seems that re-explanatory journalism is more the order of the day, as he has recycled an old article for his first Vox piece.

On April 6, 2014 Yglesias posted a piece to Vox about the “insane train boarding rules” forced on the world by Amtrak.

“Amtrak chooses to ignore 150 years of accumulated human wisdom about boarding trains,” he wrote. In fact, he had some very particular advice for Amtrak customers using Penn Station.

In the Vox piece, he announced that he had found a way to “avoid the queuing madness by adopting the following procedure,” after which he gave step-by-step instructions on how to get around the mess.

But while the advice may be perfectly fine, it isn’t the first time Yglesias has given readers these handy dandy Amtrak tips. His whole April 6 article is eerily similar to one he wrote for Slate magazine in 2013.

In his 2013 piece, he wrote of Amtrak’s “weird” boarding rules and offered a “loophole that lets you avoid some of the terribleness of Amtrak.” Then he went into step-by-step instructions.

But this Amtrak piece isn’t just another Vox piece of many by Yglesias. It is the very first one he actually wrote for the site (the only earlier one was a video and not a post actually written by Yglesias).

If something is good enough for explanatory journalism one time, apparently it is good enough for re-explanatory journalism a few months later. With Vox, everything old is new again.

Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com