Jeremy Scahill, Laura Poitras Reportedly Joining Forces With Greenwald For New Site    

Posted on Oct 15, 2013  truthdig.com  

Gage Skidmore (CC-BY-SA)

After making a little history with the British paper and website, the writer who broke the NSA surveillance story says he is leaving for a “once-in-a-career opportunity that no journalist could possibly decline.”
Greenwald did not immediately elaborate on the venture, but there’s a lot of love between his announcement and The Guardian’s report of it, and the divorce appears to be amicable.
Greenwald has been with The Guardian for only a little over a year. He previously wrote for Salon and has been a lawyer and author.
According to BuzzFeed, Greenwald is building a major new media outlet from the ground up with serious financial backing from a philanthropist (apparently not George Soros). “My role, aside from reporting and writing for it, is to create the entire journalism unit from the ground up by recruiting the journalists and editors who share the same journalistic ethos and shaping the whole thing — but especially the political journalism part — in the image of the journalism I respect most,” Greenwald is quoted as saying.
—Posted by Peter Z. Scheer

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More details emerged Wednesday about the major new media outlet that came to light when Glenn Greenwald announced he was leaving the Guardian for a “once-in-a-career opportunity.”

Glenn Greenwald, left, and Jeremy Scahill working on the documentary “Dirty Wars.” (Facebook/DirtyWars)

First, the backer: E-Bay founder Pierre Omidyar, whose net worth is close to $9 billion, is reportedlyprepared to invest as much as$250 million in the venture. It will be a for-profit company, and according to Jay Rosen, profits will be “reinvested in the journalism.” Omidyar already invests in less ambitious news projects, and is said to have become increasingly concerned with the state of journalism. His interest was also piqued when the Washington Post invited him to buy the paper, with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos ultimately winning that bid.
Although they are still in the “very early stages,” the site has already attracted big name talent. In addition to Greenwald, documentarian Laura Poitras (who helped break the Edward Snowden/NSA surveillance story) and Jeremy Scahill (author of “Blackwater” and The Nation’s national security correspondent) are said to be on board.
Here is how the whole thing will work, according to Rosen:

At the core of [the new company] will be a different plan for how to build a large news organization. It resembles what I called in an earlier post “the personal franchise model” in news. You start with individual journalists who have their own reputations, deep subject matter expertise, clear points of view, an independent and outsider spirit, a dedicated online following, and their own way of working. The idea is to attract these people to NewCo, or find young journalists capable of working in this way, and then support them well.
By “support” Omidyar means many things. The first and most important is really good editors. (Omidyar used the phrase “high standards of editing” several times during our talk.) Also included: strong back end technology. Powerful publishing tools. Research assistance. And of course a strong legal team because the kind of journalism NewCo intends to practice is the kind that is capable of challenging some of the most powerful people in the world. Omidyar said NewCo will look for “independent journalists with expertise, and a voice and a following.” He suggested that putting together a team of such people means understanding how each of them does his or her work, and supporting that, rather than forcing everyone into the same structure.

That sounds great, but there are some real hurdles that pop up. In this managing editor’s experience, independent journalists “who have their own reputations … clear points of view, an independent and outsider spirit” are exactly the sort who tend to resist “high standards of editing.” That’s assuming “high standards” means those championed by the old media (outside of ‘objectivity,’ which is a whole other discussion). Rigorous editing can seem alien, unnecessary and invasive to ambitious young journalists, although it’s exactly the sort mashup that sounds good on paper.
Nonetheless, with headliners such as Scahill, Greenwald and Poitras, Omidyar’s venture has taken enviable first steps.
—Posted by Peter Z. Scheer