Why Pierre Omidyar decided to join forces with Glenn Greenwald | Hacker News Reader

Why Pierre Omidyar decided to join forces with Glenn Greenwald

pressthink.org

167 pointsuptown47 comments

With this government shutdown, the very real possibility of default, the incompetency of many in government finally reaching and affecting the American public, the NSA leaks, the company and journalist shakedowns in the name of security, and the lightning speed at which information of all this can now reach the literal hands of millions, we're in an incredibly pivotal period in our society. I fully support Omidyar 150% for wanting to catalyze this change. Whether he may or may not be going about this the perfect way is irrelevant.

There was virtually no possibility of default. It was theater, and the more people bought into the idea of default, the more it fed into the narrative.

This comment makes me wonder how much this venture would be effective in actually producing change.

Thanks to the internet's "filter bubble" we are able to believe whatever we want to believe.

One man's "ferocious investigative journalism" is another man's theatre.

Sorry if I wasn't clear: my comment wasn't intended to be seen as a commentary on serious journalism, nor was it a commentary on the quality of journalism practiced by the subjects of the article, etc.

It was a commentary on Americans' perpetual Chicken Little mindset, and the way that feeds and funds a theatrical press, and the circular nature thereof. Everything is portrayed as being impending doom incarnate, whether it's by news outlets, marketers, religious coalitions, irreligious coalitions, etc.

America has over a fifth of the world's economy, the most military might in history and therefore control of the waterways the world over, the best breadbasket-and-navigable-rivers combination on earth, and yet every few days there's some new bogeyman around the corner that will end The Republic in a fortnight–especially if you change the channel now!–as if the winds aren't currently about as fair and the seas as following as they could reasonably be.

The Shutdown really didn't threaten any of those things in any practical terms, nor did the Boston Marathon bomber, nor did Aurora, nor did Anna Nicole Smith's offspring's paternity or whatever staged shock was programmed for the latest awards show.

Investigative journalism is wonderful. Enabling the emotionally manipulative theatrical tactics of any political entity is not investigative journalism; it's being the press arm of politicians (without even invoicing them for the help), which many, many news sources-of all stripes–are more than happy to do. Yet strangely, they continue to be held in esteem, mostly because they've always been held in esteem. (It gets worse when one's own team is the basis for most of that esteem.)

If journalists want to change the world for the better through journalism, as opposed to just maximizing ad rates and helping get their team elected, then they will only do so if they're more interested in being journalists than they are in making any particular argument, or seeing any particular outcome.

But how anyone can look at this endlessly breathless coverage of every last thing that bleeds, blows up, or politicks, and not see how utterly contrived most of it is, is beyond me.

>There was virtually no possibility of default. It was theater...

Agreed. The debt ceiling has been raised 74 times since March 1962. Of course it will be raised.

> the incompetency of many in government finally reaching and affecting the American public

There may be more, less, or the same amount of incompetence in government employees as there is in every other human endeavor. I can't speculate.

But let's be clear: the shutdown has nothing to do with that. It is a political move orchestrated by a relatively small number of power brokers in the Congress. No more, no less.

> the very real possibility of default

It was never a possibility. Only a matter of cutting a better deal for each involved party. Just like with the Wall Street bailout - it's "too big to fail". So the debt bubble will continue to grow and enrich the few at the expense of common folk worldwide.

you do realize that a default means banks and pension funds and insurance will not give money back to people just like yourself ?

That provides a default happens, which it would not. First of all, looking at last year's budget (or, whatever we have instead of a real budget which we didn't have since 2009), the government income is about $3trln, while the government spends about $250bn for debt service. So there's plenty of money to pay the pension funds. The problem is that the budget plans to spend another $3.55trln on other stuff, and 3.8 > 3. Which is the source of the trouble. But saying "we have to cut 0.8" is not the same as "we can't pay 0.25 out of 3". We can, we just prefer to spend it on other things. But if push comes to shove, the possibility to prioritize debt over other spending is there. Of course, other spending then needs to be cut. But it needs to be cut anyway, just preferably in orderly manner, not as a firefighting measure. Which, of course, is not easy since we can't even have proper budget since 2009.

The 'debt' is just treasuries. Interest bearing dollars. They get exchanged for non-interest-bearing dollars as they mature, continually rolled over as a backwards facing record of past deficits. It's the deficits that matter; and given that the rest of the world is saving dollars, they are quite necessary to maintain private sector spending.

   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.

Can't disagree more with this. The only reason news outlets currently have to cover all of that stuff is that they're still trying to act like the newspapers and TV/radio stations they replaced. When you had only one or two newspapers in town, and only two or three TV channels within range of your rabbit ears, the news business was necessarily a general one. There is no reason at all to impose this model on the Web, and there are a lot of reasons not to.

There's power in unbundling and there have certainly been some great success stories in niche / topical publications online... but at the same time there's a reason why we-do-a-little-bit-of-everything news sites still attract a huge audience. People often aren't looking for anything in particular to read, just something, and that's a really good platform from which to do investigative work, if you want people to actually see it. There's a reason why ProPublica, probably the best investigative unit out there, routinely partners with newspapers in lieu of just putting things on their own websites: many more people will see it, and that matters.

Indeed, the internets do seem to be trending towards highly focused niches rather than broad services like before.

I agree with Omidyar here. Not that I'm particularly interested in sports and entertainment: when I read the paper on line, I go straight to whatever I'm interested in (often politics, econ, etc..). Nevertheless, I thing one of the goal of this new venture is to make sure as many people as possible are aware of what's wrong with political powers. A gross restatement of their objective would be: make sure the people feeding on Fox News get another source of information, a reliable one. So they're practicing a foot-in-the-door technique: provide quality journalism for popular topics, and hope that when people browse their site, they will be more likely to stumble on important news they would otherwise have missed.

More generally, I'm very excited and hopeful about this project. It is a truly innovative experiment in an aging industry, and I hope it succeeds. For the first time in my life I'm considering subscribing to a newspaper..

I have similar interests but understand the need for fluffy diversions. To a point.

The biggest problem for me in consuming real news is rage fatigue -- so much unnecessary stupidity, pain, and greed makes it hard to digest after a while.

I think you misunderstand why the "soft" sections of the newspaper exist. Real estate, automobile, and lifestyle sections are all very profitable in terms of what they can charge advertisers, and I would guess technology and business are similar. In effect, the typical news organizations run a cross-subsidy by which advertising in the "soft" sections subsidizes the "hard" news, while the latter drives the reputation which builds the readership. It seems to me that this logic applies equally well to any advertising-driven media organization, no matter the medium.

HuffPo is capable of only biased media coverage. The Guardian is hardly a guardian of anything. The reality is that any sort of journalism, unless highly competitive and forcibly constrained to be accurate, is going to degenerate into agenda and propaganda. And only with Edward Snowden-type whistleblowing will politics be kept at arm's length as regards news reporting. Does anybody remember the shame of the New York Times after 9/11 and how the paper was a microphone for Washington? The old Grey Lady was for a time a very willing and anything goes prostitute. Washington said jump, and the NYTimes somersaulted.

So essentially a Huffington Post esque scope of coverage to lure the masses hoping to ultimately redirect their attention to internally produced ProPublica quality investigative journalism?

Pretty much!

I think they should consider having it outside of US, or if they think the US Constitution has a good chance of protecting them, then at least have 2 offices (one in US, and one in Brazil), with redundant data between the two. In case one gets shut down, the other can still report the news about what happened.

I wish I had enough money to be able to have a measurable impact on the world.

(Shrug) .30-06 cartridges are only $0.95 each at Wal-Mart.

Oh, you meant have a positive impact on the world. Well, that might cost a bit more, but you can put in some sweat equity by helping existing organizations who share your interests and values. Like the song says, we're all doin' what we can.

You may not think you can have a measurable impact on the world, but you can be part of the solution, spread the word to the rest of your network that's not aware of things like this, wake them up to what's going on right under their noses, influence them toward change. It all starts at home, and that's free.

Subscribe to companies that have positive ethics, do what you can to extend their sphere of influence. It doesn't take much to make a difference. As time goes on and you have the means to be more influential both in terms of your audience and in terms of your finances use that to further extend the sphere of influence...

Wise advice, but at the end of the day no one is really happy to make ant steps when a select few are capable of bending the world to their will like a cheap straw, for better or for worse.

Yes but if enough people stand up and make a noise, they can change the world... Just one example, though there are others: It took very few people to start the drive to abolish slavery, if they'd sat around thinking "what's the point, I'm just one person, I can't make a difference," where would we be?

I realise that many people like their status quo, with nobody really paying them any attention. They have a comfortable life, they don't rock the boat too much, they play by the rules... or at least don't leave any tangible evidence of not playing by the rules... or bribe the right people to look the other way. But I think it's every person's responsibility to stand up and vote for what they believe in. People abstaining from voting and not standing up and rocking the boat when it needs to be done are part of the problem, not part of the solution. If people want to effect change, they've got to participate, and if you don't have enough people participating to challenge the status quo, then nothing will change, ever.

It is every citizen's responsibility to do what it takes to be informed and actively make informed decisions that will lead humanity forward.

I dropped Bank of America for a credit union in 2007, and switched from Sam's (WalMart owned) to Costco in 2006. You might not have a billion, but think about what your values are, and apply the money you do spend accordingly.

Glad someone is taking this on. The recent threat to investigative journalism is a real bad indicator to America's future. Hopefully this in conjunction with Aaron Swartz's will really bring some bite back to journalism.

Now if only they can change that apathetic/ignorant attitude that so many of us Americans have...

I am a little disappointed. I was hoping for something revolutionary, but nothing put forward (at least in this brief description) is anything new. If this is actually a company and not a charity like the article states, how exactly are they going to make this thing earn money? It isn't like no one has tried to create an all encompassing news source or one that has numerous investigative journalists on staff. Do they just think they are good enough to succeed with the exact same strategy that others have used and failed?

I'd pay for Greenwald-level investigative journalism in the topics that interest me. Sports fans, finance guys, politicians, etc, take rabid interest in their respective fields, for the most part. If Omidyar can staff this new venture with journalists like Greenwald across all topics, I think he'd have a very, very valuable offering. Think of it like a TMZ for reality.

Me too... and I think it's the responsibility of everyone that has a stake in free and democratic society to support such a venture, don't you think?

And what's to stop him becoming a citizen Kane like the others? The thing that's missing for me is the history of behaving with integrity. He's no Zuckerberg, but he's no patron saint either. eBay is not a beacon of virtue.

Is the idea that having the "right" popular journalist = unbiased reporting? I struggle to see the masses being convinced - or maybe it's just me.

Just another Citizen Kane.

You may want to check http://www.nsfwcorp.com if you haven't already. Paul Carr of old techcrunch fame is the editor, and the writers include a lot of the old eXile staff, along with others. They don't cover all topics, but they definitely write some interesting articles. I've been subscribing for about a year.

Oh please! Paul "Google me!" Carr is nowhere near the league of a Glenn Greenwald. Which is not to say that he or NSFW may not be interesting (they may).

http://valleywag.gawker.com/pandodailys-threatening-email-me...

Of course not, and neither is Pierre, I'm guessing, which is why I assume they're bankrolling others to do the writing. Paul's 'twitter fight me' attitude is a turn off, but at least he very rarely writes anything.

> 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.

Interestingly, here in the Netherlands a similar venture was crowd-sourced by a few investigative reporters and personnel:

https://decorrespondent.nl/en

Fantastic. (Hopefully it doesn't become a men's club.) Greenwald should bring in Jillian York, onekade, Falguni Sheth, and all the other fantastic journalists trailing behind him.

But what of Democracy Now and Al Jazeera? Are they going to be quasi-competitors in the adversarial journalism game? Greenwald was actually contacted about possible involvement with Al-Jazeera's US TV station but that never went through..

There's no reason to think that Al Jazeera will be a player in the 'adversarial journalism' game. It's a massive media conglomerate just like NBC, CNN, or FoxNews; at best, watching al-Jazeera will just become a way for people to brand themselves as 'independent thinkers'.

Why not give money to the Guardian to extend their US operations.... they have been doing a stellar job the last few years

    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.)

By high standards of editing, I hope that the editors' only focus is pushing their writers to create better work and that the editors themselves are 100% shielded from economic pressures and the only consumer they listen to are readers.

The biggest problem with news today is that the customer is the advertiser and this customer has the ear of the editors. The news industry needs the journalistic equivalent of the chinese wall in finance. The news arm should not have contact with the advertising arm except with the presence of counsel (i.e. compliance).

At the end of the day, the 5th estate has a serious conflict of interest just as retail banking and i-banking does, and this conflict of interest likes in the gulf between advertisers and writers/editors.

I'll sign up for $20/month. Just give me an address where to send the money.

There is a surprising lack of new details here.

I know, right? If only there was a news organization focused on useful infor... oh.

Greenwald et al have learned to be sparse when it comes to sharing details. Risks are often involved -- for example, they might not have registered the domain name yet. Also it's obvious from the article that this is all in the brainstorming stages.

And yet Greenwald already quit his job. Where is he going to publish now?

I think it's awesome that billionaires are filling in the important gap in investigative journalism.

Interestingly, Jeff Skoll is also doing great work in the "content to make society" better category.

Frontline (see NFL concussion doc) and Propublica (http://www.propublica.org/series/overdose ) are doing AWESOME work in this space as well.

If Pierre invests $25m a year they can run a 100 person newsroom ($150k all in for the top journalists + tech team + sales) for 10 years for the price Bezos paid for WashPost.

Hoo-fucking-rah! I hope these guys make traction and get where they're hoping without falling off the rails, I truly do. This was what I hoped for yesterday when the rumours began circulating.

> 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

Imagine if Kara, Walt & Co join "Newco" when their AllThingsD contract ends...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com