Make no mistake, news that Glenn Greenwald is leaving The Guardian to start a new publication funded by eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar is giant news—a bigger deal, in my book, than Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post.
(UPDATE: I should disclose that the Omidyar Network helps fund CJR, something I didn’t know until shortly after I published this post.)
This isn’t just another startup.
What makes this extraordinary is the combination of muckraking—and, dare I say, dissident—journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill with the gargantuan fortune of one of the first internet billionaires.
The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo. Billionaires tend to have a finger in every pie: powerful friends they don’t want annoyed and business interests they don’t want looked at. The Way Things Are may not work for most of us, but it ain’t bad if you’re an American billionaire.
By hiring Greenwald & Co., Omidyar is making a clear statement that he’s the billionaire exception. A little more than a year ago, Greenwald was writing for Salon.com, which (somehow) has a market cap of $3.5 million. Six years ago he was still typing away on his own blog. It’s like Izzy Stone running into a civic-minded plastics billionaire determined to take I.F. Stone’s Weekly large back in the day.
NYU’s Jay Rosen interviewed Omidyar and breaks the news that he was one of the few people approached about purchasing the Washington Post. That process led Omidyar to “ask himself what could be done with the same investment if you decided to build something from the ground up,” Rosen writes.
Wait… did he say “same investment”? As in $250 million-ish? Yes he did:
I asked how large a commitment he was prepared to make in dollars. For starters: the $250 million it would have taken to buy the Washington Post.
That is an astonishing amount of money. Think about how much incredible journalism the nonprofit ProPublica has put out in the last five-plus years. It has spent just $43 million in that time to do so—total. Virtually all of that has been funded by foundation grants and reader contributions.
It will be fascinating to see how Omidyar and Greenwald set up the business model for their new venture, being truly unencumbered by legacy constraints. Omidyar tells Rosen that the site will be a company rather than a nonprofit, but that “all proceeds… will be reinvested in the journalism.” If that’s the case, it will be a sort of quasi-nonprofit: able to sell ads and otherwise act like a publishing company but paying little to no taxes.
If it takes ads. Omidyar already has a track record of supporting journalism startups, launching the well-regarded Honolulu Civil Beat in 2010. That site had a $20 a month hard paywall that has now morphed into a metered paywall that charges $10 a month. The Civil Beat calls itself “subscriber-supported journalism” and doesn’t take advertising.
The new company will surely have a different, more ambitious model. Rosen:
Omidyar believes that if independent, ferocious, investigative journalism isn’t brought to the attention of general audiences it can never have the effect that actually creates a check on power. Therefore the new entity — they have a name but they’re not releasing it, so I will just call it NewCo — will have to serve the interest of all kinds of news consumers. It cannot be a niche product. It will have to cover sports, business, entertainment, technology: everything that users demand.
At the core of Newco 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.
"a bigger deal, in my book, than Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post."
Great point! History will judge Julian Assange and Glenn Greenwald to be the two most influential journalists ever.
If the US government doesn't get its hands on them.
#1 Posted by JLS, CJR on Thu 17 Oct 2013 at 09:07 AM
Ralph Nader is smiling
#2 Posted by NadePaulKuciGravMcKi, CJR on Thu 17 Oct 2013 at 09:26 AM
We have a first-rate muckraking news organization w/o legacy costs already. Omidyar could kick the folks at DemocracyNow! a few million. They've also proved they know how to deliver on a low budget.
This is not to say Glenn/Laura/Jeremy/Pierre/et al isn't a needed venture. Never more needed, actually. Let's hope they have a climate desk.
#3 Posted by Darin Greyerbiehl, CJR on Thu 17 Oct 2013 at 10:04 AM
I'd be careful.
When Keith Olbermann became the flagship of Al Gore's current, I thought it had a lot of potential because Olbermann was the only guy on TV who was really challenging the fox media bubble. Later, it became apparent that Olbermann's strength came out of his toxic nature which grew to sabotage current.
I'm sorry, but I see that same dynamic in Glen. I'm going to wait and see.
And, in the meantime, if anyone's complimenting the work on democracy now, I'll be the one seconding it.
#4 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 17 Oct 2013 at 11:47 AM
I'm a fan of GG. He is smart and articulate and tireless. He also fell for the propaganda of WMD and the Iraq war. That is a huge nick in the armor. It exposes a fundamental flaw.
I am cautiously optimistic that this billion funded enterprise is independent with an edge and a mission to be the model of the 4th estate.
#5 Posted by Mark, CJR on Thu 17 Oct 2013 at 03:10 PM
"He also fell for the propaganda of WMD and the Iraq war. That is a huge nick in the armor. It exposes a fundamental flaw."
I'd question that. I'm no fan of Glen, but if you were a disinterested citizen who thought his government had enough competence and checks to function without too much betrayal of the public, you might just think that maybe something had to be done about Sadaam Hussien given the 9-11 experience which was recent in everyone's minds and the reporting in the nytimes.
The people who knew better, or should have known better, were the ones who failed us. The institutions we trusted, failed us. I knew better about the Iraq invasion, but in order to know better at the time you had to be a little obsessive and aware of sources beyond the traditional since traditional sources were set on blacking us out.
Holding Glen Greenwald accountable for a 2002 prowar Iraq position would be like holding a 10 year old accountable for his bad calculus scores. There just weren't that many 10 year olds doing the math at that level in 2002/3 and even 2004.
The teachers, our supposed authorites, on the other hand...
#6 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 17 Oct 2013 at 04:01 PM
Thimbles, my memory is better than yours. There were about 30% of us in 2002 doing the math. Worldwide the number was higher with massive demonstrations across the globe.
Bush/Cheney, Colin Powell at the UN. You got to be kidding me. Yes, those that went along need to held accountable. Looking back is important.
We can learn from our mistakes. Hopefully GG did.
#7 Posted by Mark, CJR on Thu 17 Oct 2013 at 04:30 PM
Trust me, I know all about looking back.
http://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/after_charlotte_baffled_by_the_horse_race.php#comment-65286
And, trust me, I believe in holding the accountable responsible. I do not think GG, 2002 was in a position where he had sufficient knowledge and experience to be held to account for his views, and even if he had the knowledge and was still wrong, his views weren't voiced in public. There's a big difference between believing an error, spreading an error, and actting upon an error.
Glen's error had no impact on others. No one would have been aware of the error had Glen not put it in a preface. He did not spread, nor act upon the error.
If we're going to hold everyone to the standard that they must be perfect from birth, aside from Paul Krugman and Jesus Christ, we're going to be disappointed with everybody.
#8 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 17 Oct 2013 at 05:17 PM
Why don't they enlist Gwynne Dyer as weii? For years this man has spoken the truth about the middle east indeed if the USA had listened to him they would have known what the result of their Iraq adventure would be without wasting 1000's of lives and billions of dollars.
#9 Posted by Ian Kiddle, CJR on Fri 18 Oct 2013 at 03:48 AM
I love this article, but you should clarify your graf about non-profits. There is no such thing as a "quasi-nonprofit."
For example, 501(c)(3) non-profits are allowed to earn revenues for related and unrelated activities and they pay corporate taxes on those revenues. If their unrelated revenues are too high or consume too many staff resources, the IRS might challenge their non-profit status.
#10 Posted by Robb Montgomery, CJR on Fri 18 Oct 2013 at 10:52 AM
Greenwald and his friends from the Guardian and The Nation have never hesitated to proclaim their philosophy: the United States and Israel are the world's villains, and the good fight for a better world must consist of undermining the US and destroying Israel. Are there other culprits in the world, for instance the governments of Russia and China, or world-wide Islamic terrorism ? No, these are not worth mentioning as problematic, according to Greenwald and his friends. So this new enterprise, thanks to the Omidyar billions, will be organized as a battle against the united States and a battle to destroy Israel. Mr. Omidyar, who owes his good fortune to having been given refuge and opportunity in the US, will have the satisfaction of making the world just a little worse due to his efforts.
#11 Posted by werner cohn, CJR on Sat 19 Oct 2013 at 08:46 PM
There's a guy named M Cutcheon, a successful bidness man from Alabama, wants to support politicians who vote the way he likes with donations in money amounts which are arbitrarily limited. At the same time, there are these guys like Bezos and Omidyar and Soros and Koch who also seek to influence politics through the use of their fortunes. McCutcheon doesn't have the resources to buy The Washington Post or start a new and presumptively left-leaning journalistic enterprise. Tell me again how 'Citizens United' was wrongly decided, that money does not equal poltical speech, and how we need to get money out of politics . . . One of the problems with bourgeois urban liberalism is that such nice people don't even, as a general rule, believe in their own professed positions, when given the choice of those positions vs. application of those positions to their own lives and careers . . . No CJR think piece deploring the 'purchase' of influence by Omidyar will be forthcoming, I daresay, and I think prospects for career advancement for CJR's young staffers just improved.
#12 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Sun 20 Oct 2013 at 08:12 PM
"Omidyar, Soros, and Koch"
'Oh my!'
Am I the only one who heard this in a Judy Garland voice?
I'll tell you what I didn't hear... the name Rupert Fricken Murdoch. And I didn't heard any of the names that make am radio a belching conservative talking point delivery mechanism.
I guess this was more of Mark's usual derpity, derpity, doo.
Did it contain the words 'bourgeois liberalism'? Oh yes, classic Mark.
#13 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Mon 21 Oct 2013 at 10:28 AM
To Thimbles, your usual lathering must have caused you to miss the point. The 'right' is not opposing the use of money by people like Omidyar and Bezos to advance their political views, indeed that faction defends it on free-speech grounds. Irony-impaired about themselsves as usual, people on the 'left' are all excited when gazillionaires fund their own causes, but need a change of underwear when their opponents have to go to the Supreme Court to do the same. I'm just calling out this particular example of bourgeois liberal hypocrisy. Even your abuse is more childish than usual.
#14 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Mon 21 Oct 2013 at 12:38 PM
First off, I reiterate "I don't hear the name Rupert Fricken Murdoch". Wonder why?
Second off, this is not a political campaign nor political donation, unlike what's covered under Citizens United. It's a journalism outfit, and not one I even support particularly. It's another Fox News, another media venture with a slanted voice. Nobody objects to fox speaking with a slanted voice, nobody claims Fox News speech should be regulated, we only object to fox when it's speaking with a false voice, as it often does in service to its political slant. When Glen Greenwald does the same, we'll object to that too.
Citizens united basically legalizes political bribery and retaliation by the monied class. Do you support that?
Third off, you folks are for free speech (money) without regulation when it's your side. When it's our side, you use all the political and economic tools in your arsenal to destroy the speaker.
But I'll tell you what, I'll stop complaining about unaccountable money being dumped into our political systems, so that only policies protecting the monied classes are the only ones politically possible, if you start policing and ostracizing your well funded, firebombing radicals a tenth of the amount that you police the left.
What a deal, eh?
#15 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Mon 21 Oct 2013 at 07:42 PM
"First off, I reiterate "I don't hear the name Rupert Fricken Murdoch". Wonder why?"
Mobile websites - in my base, borking my links. grr.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/10/21/fox-news-used-sock-puppet-accounts-to-counter-negative-blog-posts-new-book-claims/
#16 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Mon 21 Oct 2013 at 11:36 PM