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Dylan Matthews is an American journalist. He is currently a correspondent for Vox, an online media venture.
In October 2013, Wonkblog journalist Ezra Klein and Matthews spearheaded the launch of "Know More", a new blog under The Washington Post targeted at replicating the viral phenomenon of popular websites such as BuzzFeed. The project's success gained Matthews recognition internally in The Washington Post and externally. Matthews won The Washington Post "Publisher's Award" of October 2013 for his work on Know More. A leaked internal memo from The Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth announcing the award stated:
When interviewed about the strategy of the project, Matthews suggested it was primarily about publishing content that would be shared and virally-distributed on Facebook: "The most obvious similarity to there is in targeting Facebook rather than Twitter. If you look at any site that does well socially, there's just a handful that get their traffic from Twitter. Journalists sometimes forget this because we tend to really like Twitter."
Responding to negative comparisons with BuzzFeed, Matthews said: "It really irks me when people act like they're better than BuzzFeed, which is an extremely effective journalism outfit—much better than most at being honestly what people are looking for." Klein also rejected direct comparisons to "clickbait", arguing: "There's this idea that there's this thing called click-bait that everybody wants to click on. If I could figure out what that is and get people to click on good content—my god, what a wonderful thing!"
Matthews is on the advisory board of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, an Economics published by the American Economic Association.
Charity evaluator and effective altruism advocate GiveWell published a conversation with Matthews from when he was still working for The Washington Post Wonkblog section.
In 2016, the Autistic Self Advocacy Network recognized Matthews as the most outstanding autistic journalist of the year by presenting him with the Harriet McBryde Johnson Award for Non-Fiction Writing.
Matthews identifies with the effective altruism movement and is a member of Giving What We Can, a community of people who have pledged to give at least 10% of their income to effective charities.
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