Between June 2013 and January 2014, Matthews blogged at the Wonkblog section of the Washington Post, focusing on taxes, budgets, and other elements of US economic and fiscal policy. 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 reach 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 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 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!"
Vox.com
In late January 2014, Klein and Matthews announced that they, along with Matthew Yglesias and Melissa Bell, would be starting a new online media venture with Vox Media. The venture, named Vox.com, launched in early April 2014, and Matthews wrote his first article for the site in April 2014. The scientific research Matthews reported on in that article turned out to be fraudulent, and 13 months later he wrote a mea culpa article about the fraud and how he was deceived by it. Matthews leads the Vox section Future Perfect, dedicated to effective altruism.
Other writing
Matthews has also written for Salon and The New Republic and has appeared on Bloggingheads.tv. His writings have covered basic income, immigration policy, effective altruism, among other topics.
Reception
Matthews was listed as one of "five rising stars under 25" in Politics Daily by Katie Glueck in 2010. Matthews is noted for his use of data visualizations in his publications. 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.
