Glenn Greenwald’s resignation from the Guardian for a “new venture” backed by Civil Beat’s Pierre Omidyar has been reverberating since the announcement yesterday.
Now PressThink.org has provided more details based on a telephone conversation with Omidyar (“Why Pierre Omidyar decided to join forces with Glenn Greenwald for a new venture in news“).
It seems that Greenwald’s exclamation about a “once-in-a-career opportunity” is right on the mark.
According to PressThink, Omidyar was one of the parties looking at the potential purchase of the Washington Post, and later began seriously thinking about what could be done if the same capital were invested in a new venture.
As he was contemplating the Post purchase, he began to get more alarmed about the pressures coming down on journalists with the various leak investigations in Washington. Then the surveillance stories started appearing and the full scope of the threat to independent journalism became clear. His interest in launching a new kind of news organization, capable of sustaining investigative work and having an effect with it, intensified throughout the summer as news from the Snowden files continued to pour forth.
Attempts to meet with Greenwald to discuss these plans and to find out more about how he operates were unsuccessful until this month. When they finally were able to talk, Omidyar learned that Greenwald, his collaborator Laura Poitras, and The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill had been planning to form their own journalism venture. Their ideas and Omidyar’s ideas tracked so well with each other that on October 5 they decided to “join forces” (his term.) This is the news that leaked yesterday. But there is more.
The column goes on to describe the shape of the new collaboration and some of its outlines, although specifics are still to be decided.
This is a must read and an exciting initiative.
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This is excellent news involving two journalists of integrity that I admire, Grennwald and Scahill.
“the Washington Past.”
Freudian slip? Got a chuckle out of me.
🙂
N
I’m not sure what he has seen from his experiment with Civil Beat that makes him think something more global will work…..he does have one thing going for him, a lot of money. For a so called media guy he sure has a lot of “no comment” and “refused interview requests”. I thought that if you’re in the biz and the story is about you or your company that was a media no no? All these years later we still don’t know if CB has 50 subscribers are 5,000. I’m guessing that if it were closer to the 5k number we would be told that. Guess we will stay tuned and see what shakes out.
Oh, love these cautions against starting the glee too early, Black Kettle. Unfolding situation is taking me back to my days of reading SPY vs SPY in Mad Magazine.
Haven’t had a chance to look at the PressThink piece but it sounds like Civil Beat has already been rendered a pale echo of the new venture’s grand plans.
I hope this effort works out. We have lost far too many papers in the last ten years. But it was interesting that the model he describes for reporting is exactly what the old news media provided. Variety, and solid reporters. But nothing in the interview described new revenue streams in the post-Craigslist world. Best wishes Pierre. We news hounds want you to prevail. But this interview didn’t provide any new ideas behind the venture to support our hopes. Perhaps he’s keeping those ideas for later release.
wOw! I read it first on Ian Lind’s blog! Thanks for sharing the good news. So happy for Glenn Greenwald, and for all of us too!
As a longtime reader of Greenwald, going back well before the Snowden revelations, I have concerns about his voice being silent while this startup gets organized. I am also worried about him leaving the Guardian, one of the MAJOR newspapers in the English language. While Pierre Omidyar is both very wealthy and very intelligent, I worry whether he can build a platform with as large a megaphone as the Guardian for amplifying Greenwald’s voice. And, for that matter, that of the courageous and perceptive Jeremy Scahill. I hope Scahill continues to report through Democracy Now and other media outlets and does not become exclusive to Omidyar’s hypothetical media center.
Anonymous Kolea has a point.
A generous donation (not investment) by Pierre Omidyar to The Guardian and Democracy Now will provide more good journalism than creating a new media company. Omidyar is an innovator, and innovators engage in out-of-the-box thinking and innovate, seeking to create wealth in new ways.
But some things are less amenable to reinvention than others. Question: is journalism one of those things that benefits more from tradition than innovation?
We can see the fruits of innovation in Honolulu Civil Beat. Do we prefer, and need, contextless journalism that provides little sense of who we are, really are, and our complicated past?
There is something grand about journalism, traditionally conceived. On this site, I’ve already called attention to the words of Charles Prestwich Scott, the long-time editor of The Manchester Guardian. Here is C.P. Scott again: “The function of a good newspaper and therefore of a good journalist is to see life steady and see it whole.”
I hafta think that Greenwald will be on contract to the Guardian and others during the transition, and perhaps even after.
To what extent is this venture not a bold novelty, but fairly typical?
From a Reuters blog:
http://blogs.reuters.com/jackshafer/2013/10/17/pierre-omidyar-and-the-bottomless-optimism-of-billionaire-publishers/
There’s nothing quite like owning a newspaper, if one can afford it.
Unfortunately, these things so very rarely work out.
However, the volatile nature of technological change in the news business might give this venture an advantage.
But make no mistake, Omidyar is driven by idealism, and this venture does involve bold risk.
Omidyar’s bold scheme is most welcome in the already crowded world of journalism.
One question might be, Is this venture more advocacy and ideology than it is what is usually understood as ‘objective’ journalism’?
One argument I recall from college is that every ideology eventually fizzles out.
That is, even if a particular form of government (say, a multiparty electoral system) prevails, its ideological underpinnings can nevertheless become discredited (the way some leftists lost faith with Marxism after visiting the Soviet Union in the 1930s, even though the Soviet state persisted for another couple of generations).
What ideologies do accomplish, however, is to serve as a kind of ‘delivery vehicle’ for critical thought.
Even conservative ideologies that argues against critical thought utilize critical thought (e.g., German intellectuals argued after the French Revolution that the public use of critical argument is fine for the educated classes, but undermines religious faith among the workers and unravels the social order; but even this anti-critical conservative line of reasoning was an example of critical reasoning).
So, supporting advocacy — for example, a popular environmental organization — is relatively inefficient as a long-term source of social transformation. It’s much more effective to support something like balanced and thorough journalism, or education or research. However, that route is discomforting. With real research or critical thought, you never know what you are going to get. It’s a loose cannon.
This sort of reminds me of Ian Lind’s recent comment that the hopes of the Native Hawaiian sovereignty movement are ‘unrealistic’. On this topic I would not know, I am not even sure what ‘sovereignty’ means in this context (I saw some UH Law School videos that explained that it would mean Native Hawaiians the kind of legal status that Native American tribes have). In fact, I am not sure what ‘realism’ means, or ‘idealism’ (especially in terms of journalism or science, where the ideal is to discover and reveal the real).
But the Native Hawaiian sovereignty movement might serve a different (albeit unintentional) purpose of injecting critical thought into a political culture that has virtually none.
For example, the former publisher of the Honolulu Advertiser, Thurston Twigg-Smith, is against the sovereignty movement, but I remember an quote where he acclaimed it as something like “the only thing going on in this town”. I suspect that he meant in terms of critical thought. And that’s a very journalistic perspective.
So, it might be better to simply support critical thought in its purer form of great journalism than to support ideologically slanted advocacy.
However, the problem with this is, great journalism — like great education and great research — is rare. And sometimes nonexistent (e.g., in Hawaii). So maybe the only way to foster critical thought in the real world might be to go the route of ideological advocacy … even though in the long-run the ideological perspective itself will inevitably crumble.
(At least this is what I sort of recall from college.)
With all due respect, let me suggest “ideologies” do not all “fizzle out.” Some become absorbed into the “common sense” of a society, which does not make them less “ideological” or more objective. It just means the biases inherent in the ideology are more broadly shared.
The ideology which denies it IS an ideology is generally just the ideology of the dominant group. Those of us who are not in that dominant group might want to avoid assuming their viewpoint as our own.
Let me suggest a test of the “ideological” biases of the named journalists and test them against the biases of the “Newspaper of Record.” Go back and read what Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald were saying about US foreign policy ten years ago and compare the accuracy, even the “objectivity” of their reporting against that provided by the New York Times.
I suggest your assumptions about which journalism is more distorted by an ideological bias falls apart upon the first test of history.
PayPal succumbed to pressure by denying service to Wiki Leaks thus setting the standard of being a merely another government tool by suppressing the money flow supporting a powerful new form journalism. One that could be financed by donations small, medium and large. A protest by Anonymous followed and is now being used to set another standard of persecution, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/22/paypal-wikileaks-protesters-ddos-free-speech, of any dissent that isn’t being financed by some billionaire who accumulated said wealth having a PayPal account. Ebay would be Nobay without it. So now Big Bucks, still on the Board of
Ebay, will supply us of all pertinent information over a medium that monitors and records our choices and opinions for possible later use of more suppression.
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Dean Little
Whatever becomes of his latest venture, I have mixed feelings about profit motives and a “free” press. A “free” press is necessary for true democracy. Having to pay to get information about what your government is doing is something else entirely. And I’m not sure how you can have an informed electorate under a pay-to-know system.