![]() ![]() The problems at First Look are many, including an essential culture clash between people who appear to have antithetical opinions about everything from management style to subject matter to seating arrangements to whether journalists should have landlines. An early rush to hire staff-less than two dozen all told-was quickly followed by a period of caution and circumspection as Omidyar began to think afresh about how he wanted his new journalism venture to look: the kind of thinking that everyone agrees would have been helpful to work out earlier. ![]() That the four of them weren’t disciplined or fired reveals something fundamental about the strange standoff at the heart of the enterprise.įirst Look began in the fall of 2013, amid a flurry of enthusiasm over the Snowden revelations, and amid intense pressure to keep publishing stories based on his vast cache of documents. The article was journalistic independence as performance art, an act of self-conscious insubordination to defend a fallen comrade-Taibbi-and salvage the autonomy, or at least the appearance of it, that the entire venture had been founded on. More specifically, Omidyar is attempting to create a news organization with the help of individuals who have made their careers eschewing-when not mocking-news organizations of all stripes. “He hired a newsroom of unmanageables,” one veteran newspaper editor told me. In many respects, the current turmoil was entirely predictable. These departures have laid bare how Omidyar’s process-driven approach to management clashed with the ways of the independent-minded journalists he hired. ![]() John Cook, editor in chief of what is so far First Look’s only publication, The Intercept, is leaving the site at the end of 2014 to return to his former employer, the gossip-and-news site Gawker. One of its most high-profile journalists, former Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi, left in October after clashing with Omidyar and his deputies, amid allegations of insubordination and possibly gender-based hostility on Taibbi’s part. First Look Media, as Omidyar’s enterprise has come to be called, is beset by staff turmoil and dissatisfaction. Omidyar announced that the new endeavor would have a “core mission around supporting and empowering independent journalists across many sectors and beats.”Īs Omidyar has by now discovered, starting an organization from scratch was hardly a safeguard against dealing with people who fundamentally disagreed with him. They were joined by Jeremy Scahill, another Academy Award-nominated documentary-film maker and a writer for The Nation, who had also cultivated an aggressive persona and strong relationships with national-security whistle-blowers. edition, and Laura Poitras, an Academy Award-nominated documentary-film maker, who had been the first journalist to take Snowden seriously, and who did the most to bring his revelations to light. He enlisted two of the journalists who had reported on the Snowden documents: Glenn Greenwald, an aggressive and sometimes strident columnist and former lawyer, who had been writing a column for *The Guardian’*s U.S. Soon afterward, Omidyar pledged to start his own news organization and match Bezos’s investment in the Post. But the discussions with Graham had solidified Omidyar’s resolve to dive deeper into the world of journalism. “I got excited about it.”ĭon Graham ended up selling the Post and some affiliated publications to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos for $250 million. As a memoir reader, he was all business: “I tried to skim through some of the personal stories, just focus on the newspaper ones,” Omidyar told me when I visited him in Hawaii last fall. During those months, Omidyar read the autobiography of Graham’s mother, Katharine Graham, who had been the publisher of the Post when the newspaper ran its stories on Watergate and the Pentagon Papers. The two men continued to correspond over the summer. Omidyar was intrigued by Graham’s passionate pitch for the kind of public-service journalism the Post produces. The two had recently exchanged messages about the Post but had never before spoken directly. One morning in June 2013, just days after the first stories based on Edward Snowden’s classified-document trove started appearing in The Guardian and The Washington Post, Omidyar received a call there from the Washington Post Company’s chairman and C.E.O., Don Graham, who wanted to talk to him about buying the newspaper. Down the street is a row of simple restaurants, and when Omidyar is in town, the billionaire founder of eBay often walks from his office to his favorite lunch spot, a place that he prefers not to have named, partly because he loves it and partly for reasons of security. Pierre Omidyar’s office in Honolulu occupies the second floor of a low-slung and unassuming commercial building, across from a park and a school. ![]()
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