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NY Times, Nov. 1 2014
At First Look Media, Personalities Prove Tough to Manage
By RAVI SOMAIYA and NOAM COHEN
When First Look Media, the journalism enterprise backed by the
billionaire founder of eBay, Pierre M. Omidyar, started about a year
ago, its mission was clear.
Mr. Omidyar would personally invest $250 million to build a company that
would hold the powerful accountable. He paid lavishly to recruit
adversarial reporters like Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, who had
received classified documents from the former National Security Agency
contractor Edward J. Snowden, and Matt Taibbi, who used a piercing wit
and deep reporting to skewer most of Wall Street during his time at
Rolling Stone magazine.
And then Mr. Omidyar tried to manage them.
Mr. Taibbi abruptly left First Look this week without ever writing a
story. On Thursday, an unusual article appeared on The Intercept, a
First Look-owned site started by Mr. Greenwald and others. It described
a power struggle inside First Look between Silicon Valley executives
“and the fiercely independent journalists who view corporate cultures
and management-speak with disdain.”
Mr. Omidyar, according to people with knowledge of internal discussions
at First Look who spoke on condition of anonymity, seemed not to realize
what he had gotten into by hiring so many aggressive and competitive
journalists and then trying to manage them largely from his home in
Hawaii, with only sporadic visits to First Look’s offices.
The Racket, a so-far-unpublished digital magazine Mr. Taibbi was brought
in to create, was envisioned as a modern version of Spy magazine, whose
blend of satire and reporting skewered the establishment in the 1980s
and 1990s. But it has so far been subject to the kind of muckraking it
aspired to. As for its fate — and those of its dozen or so employees —
it’s unlikely to continue as Mr. Taibbi envisioned it, people inside
First Look say, though there is a desire to keep the publication in some
form. Morale inside the company was damaged, these people said, and
there is concern over retaining and hiring staff. Mr. Taibbi, meanwhile,
has a feature article in the next issue of Rolling Stone, the magazine
said on Friday. Representatives of First Look and Mr. Taibbi declined to
comment.
The loss of Mr. Taibbi, a journalist with an avid following, is a blow
to First Look as it tries to distinguish itself in a fiercely
competitive and crowded start-up digital media market. Among others,
Fusion, Vox and Quartz have been hiring reporters and editors with web
experience. Medium, started by two of the founders of Twitter, is
something between a publisher and a platform. And BuzzFeed and Vice have
recently expanded their reporting ambitions and raised millions from
eager investors. Even older companies like Bloomberg Media are seeking
to revamp themselves with infusions of fresh talent.
First Look has been among the best funded and most promising of those
sites. Mr. Omidyar’s $250 million investment matched the amount that
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, paid for The Washington Post in
August, and First Look’s first prominent hire, Mr. Greenwald, went on to
win the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Mr. Snowden. It made
significant noneditorial hires, including bringing in as its top lawyer
the former general counsel of The New Yorker magazine.
The nearly 2,000-word article described Mr. Omidyar as a micromanager
who personally approved reporters’ expenses and imposed a three-month
hiring freeze just as they were building their staffs. The article also
reported that a female employee had accused Mr. Taibbi of being
“verbally abusive and unprofessionally hostile,” behavior that it said
was perhaps motivated in part by her gender.
In a statement attached to the article, Alex Pareene, The Racket’s
executive editor, disputed that account and said he had never witnessed
such hostility by Mr. Taibbi. First Look Media, he said, “repeatedly
took incidents that should’ve been minor hiccups of the sort experienced
at any media company or start-up and, through incompetence, escalated
them into full-blown crises.” His account was supported by others at the
company.
For industry observers, a clash between a low-profile billionaire and an
iconoclastic reporter was hard to resist. Paul Carr, the editorial
director of PandoDaily, a Silicon Valley news site, published part of an
off-the-record conversation in which Mr. Carr accused Mr. Omidyar of
editorial interference. First Look’s journalists deny that charge.
Others noted the inherent challenges in journalism start-ups that seek
to build themselves around big names. “The naïveté of trying to
construct something around very irascible personalities is coming to the
front,” said Rafat Ali, the co-founder of Skift, a website covering the
travel industry, and the media news site PaidContent. “Back in the day,
there was a reason there were temperamental journalists and then editors
and subeditors. Editors were the people who managed these egos.”
Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, who was an
adviser to First Look until October, before parting amicably, said in an
interview on Friday that one of the things he had learned was that “it’s
very hard to start an editorial organization from nothing. To have no
structure is impossible.”
New York magazine, which broke the news of Mr. Taibbi’s departure, plans
to run a longer story on the dispute next week. It will, the magazine
said, describe Mr. Omidyar as “mild-mannered” and “looking for a way to
spend his time and fortune.”
Mr. Omidyar’s concerns about the atmosphere at First Look can perhaps be
guessed from a job description for a publisher to oversee both The
Racket and The Intercept. The posting was emailed to prospective
candidates in recent weeks and obtained by The New York Times.
Requirements included “interacts civilly,” “ego in check: it’s about the
team, not about me” and “you care more about the company’s success than
about your title or status.” It also specified reacting “calmly to
criticism and negative feedback.”
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