The Pierre Omidyar Insurgency | Hacker News Reader

The Pierre Omidyar Insurgency

nymag.com

71 pointssamclemens18 comments

I come away from this thinking that Omidyar doesn’t have any particular expertise or insight about running a journalism startup. He seems like a dilletante, trying to improve the world perhaps, but mostly trying to live an interesting life. Which is fine but not a recipe for success.

He’d be more effective either as a foundation giving grants to worthy journalists, or as a VC of same.

> I come away from this thinking that Omidyar doesn’t have any particular expertise or insight about running a journalism startup. > He seems like a dilletante, trying to improve the world perhaps, but mostly trying to live an interesting life. Which is fine but not a recipe for success.

That's for sure the impression that the article wants us to have. I certainly don't know Omidyar, but I want to read a more neutral article (or at least other viewpoints, including Omidyar's himself) about him to form a clearer opinion.

That the top level editorial staff almost went into revolt over what they perceived to be "the lack of clear budgets and repeated and arbitrary restrictions on hiring" is pretty damning. That said, this article reads like a somewhat routine profile that messily switches course mid-stream in reaction to events on the ground.

I'm interested in hearing more about this:

> There was an East Coast–West Coast feud, a divide between the journalists and the technologists. Omidyar’s loyalists out in California and Hawaii grumbled as Greenwald traveled the world, promoting a book, picking up awards, and speaking out of turn.

The NYT Innovation report makes the case that editorial and technology/design working closely is important not just for the primary products of the business, but for fostering trust and opening up communication between the business department and the newsroom. Seems like that'd be difficult if the company is physically separated by the whole United States (and half the Pacific in some cases).

http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/05/the-leaked-new-york-times-i...

These articles also left the impression that the journalists were hired believing that Omidyar was funding this org with $250m and partway through he switched to wanting them to make money / be self sustainable. We still essentially have no method after craigslist destroyed the newspapers to support long form investigative journalism. The huffpo is what you get when you try to make journalism pay its own way; there are only a tiny handful of exceptions (nyt, ft, the la times has repeated layoffs, perhaps the wsj though that's really murdoch's right wing hobbyhorse).

Original source regarding the Matt Taibbi debacle: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/10/30/inside-story-m...

kinda-sorta-disclosure: it includes a quote from a high school friend of mine, who also happens to be the executive editor of Racket:

    We were successfully working to address those
    issues when First Look once again stepped in
    to fuck things up. I regret that the world
    won’t get a chance to see Matt Taibbi’s Racket.

This being Hacker News...I'm really interested in hearing what people have to say about RASCI, something I had never heard about until the parent comment's link:

> Taibbi and other journalists who came to First Look believed they were joining a free-wheeling, autonomous, and unstructured institution. What they found instead was a confounding array of rules, structures, and systems imposed by Omidyar and other First Look managers on matters both trivial—which computer program to use to internally communicate, mandatory regular company-wide meetings, mandated use of a “responsibility assignment matrix” called a “RASCI,” popular in business-school circles for managing projects—as well as more substantive issues.

That doesn't sound much fun for managing business/IT projects, I can imagine journalists just hating it.

The Wikipedia entry doesn't do RASCI any favors in promoting it as any sort of useful artifact from what I can tell.

It seems most like a "blame matrix."

it's not entirely worthless

if, after a meeting, you circulate a quick set of (1) what did we agree on, (2) who is the person responsible for each of (1), (3) who requires signoff on various (1) I find it quite useful. It's good to have it written down to serve as a consensus from the meeting to reduce miscommunication about who has what commitments and who must sign off.

Lots of orgs use stuff like this: github has a Primarily Responsible Person, apple has something similar.

That said, I've never had to draw out a formal rasci chart, and this can easily be taken too far. In a team of maybe 1-10 people this level of formality is way overkill.

Welcome to a corporate environment. If you know how to navigate the red tape, you can get things done, if you don't then you'll leave for greener pastures.

http://pando.com/2014/10/28/taibbi-takes-time-out-from-first...

Thanks for this.

I already had my suspicions about Firstlook Media, and this just reiterates them.

Secondly, I am not too impressed with the way Greenwald has been guarding the leaks and his organisation is the sole benefactor of their contents as he trickles them selectively to the public. The documents should be accessible to all. Having said that I am an admirer of his work, but would love to have seen the documents given to Wikileaks

Greenwald is not the sole possessor of the documents. The Guardian also has a copy. The reason the documents have not been given to Wikileaks is specifically because of a request Snowden made regarding the way the documents would be handled. He asked Greenwald and Poitras to be cautious about disclosures and to not just give away the whole cache to the entire world.

Greenwald is not the only journalist with access to the documents: this has been explained and mentioned several times. Several news organizations had access to the cache including The Guardian, New York Times, Washington Post and others. The idea was that the professional journalists would be better at figuring out what was both news-worthy and ethical to release. There are already people claiming Snowden personally gave an autographed copy to Putin and then we have folks on the other side like you who are misinformed and . Obviously, taking people like you and the people acting like Snowden forwarded everything to the FSB/Chi-Coms into consideration, there is absolutely nothing anyone can do to release this material in a fashion that some uninformed person won't complain about.

Wikileaks have claimed that they have Russian diplomatic cables just as explosive as the "Pentagon Cables" but it's been years without any release which leads me to think that they either: a) don't have them and are lying b) have them and are not releasing them for some political reason which would be even worse. I wouldn't trust them at all to release any important information in a thoughtful manner.

I guess I phrased my comment incorrectly. I am aware that other organization have the documents, but my problems is questioning journalist/news organizations as the gate keepers to what the public should know/should not know.

>"The idea was that the professional journalists would be better at figuring out what was both news-worthy and ethical to release"

I completely disagree with this.

Can you provide some a source for the claims about wikileaks?

What kind of suspicions do you have?

That there will be some restrictions on 'editorial independence' and the fact that Matt Taibbi has left the organization kind of supports this.

As the others have said, and they have also given to the Washington Post, too. But they seem to have stopped writing about it. Perhaps too focused on trying to support Comey in his war on encryption, these days.

One another thing - I wouldn't trust Pando with these sort of things. Look at another ridiculous thing they've written a few months ago, as if it wasn't already know that Tor was made by the government and part of the funding still comes from it (more than half), now:

http://pando.com/2014/07/16/tor-spooks/

But Tor is open source and can be verified. I believe almost all of Dan Berstein's protocols are also funded "by the government". Does that mean we shouldn't trust his curves and protocols anymore?

I think we should all have a healthy dose of skepticism regarding these issues, but when it makes sense to do so.

> Does that mean we shouldn't trust his curves and protocols anymore?

A tough question - what is the general consent on it?

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