If there were a person who could speak for digital news media as a whole, I imagine that person would presently be delivering an epic mea culpa to readers everywhere. The last six months, to put it charitably, have been rough for this industry. And while the websites that ...read more
"Eventually First Look Media will just be Pierre’s Second Life avatar wandering around an open-space office plan." -- An anonymous First Look Media employee, speaking to Chris Lehmann, a contributing editor at In These Times Because of the grand jury decision in the Ferguson ...read more
A couple of weeks ago, Matt Taibbi departed First Look Media in a torrent of bad blood, leaving Pierre Omidyar's $250-million online journalism start-up to go back to the stability and apparent sanity of Rolling Stone. Just yesterday, Taibbi seemed to breathe a very noticeable ...read more
(Photo: Neilson Barnard/Getty Images North America) This past Friday, Matt Taibbi appeared on HuffPost Live to talk about his new piece in Rolling Stone. The article, on a JPMorgan Chase whistleblower, was originally supposed to launch Taibbi's online magazine at First Look ...read more
(Photo: Robert Johnson/Business Insider) Part of what we do here is write about the media and there's nothing more inside baseball than writing about the media. There are more jokes than I can count that involve journalists breathlessly detailing the comings and goings of other ...read more
Updated Below So Matt Taibbi is officially out at First Look Media. Yesterday, the outlet's founder Pierre Omidyar -- the tech billionaire responsible for eBay -- released a statement confirming what many had begun to surmise given Taibbi's extended "leave of absence" from the ...read more
Not too long ago, we covered a story at The Daily Banter about a tranche of grant money distributed to several nonprofits by Pierre Omidyar's First Look Media. In case you're just joining us, author Glenn Greenwald is the founding editor for First Look's The Intercept, a news and ...read more
UPDATE below. You might recall several weeks ago when First Look Media, owned by Pierre Omidyar with Glenn Greenwald as his premiere talent, announced $550,000 in grants given to three organizations, two with which Greenwald has maintained a personal association. The most ...read more
Today, Glenn Greenwald tweeted the following announcement about his current employer, First Look Media: Interesting. The Freedom of the Press Foundation received $350,000 from First Look, while the Electronic Frontier Foundation received less than a third of that sum: $100,000. ...read more
Take a look at this excerpt from an interview with Gawker editor John Cook last month in Poynter, the official publication of the renowned Poynter Institute. It'll be important in just a minute. “I love Glenn Greenwald,” Cook continued, “but he’s basically keeping the same ...read more
Matt Taibbi is one of the best writers about politics, the media, and finance on planet earth right now. When I say that, I don't mean that everything he writes is particularly revealing or that every one of his pieces can legitimately be called a journalistic triumph, but if the ...read more
Photo: The Intercept"Glenn has his way of approaching journalism. He’s very upfront and transparent, and people who follow his work do so because they really appreciate that and admire it... What’s interesting about this is there has been almost no responsible criticism of ...read more
One way of understanding the route of bias in the media is to look at the funding model behind the outlet. If a media company is owned by a giant corporate conglomerate, the odds are that it won't base much of its reporting on media consolidation. If a news network is owned by ...read more
We're learning more about the new business venture involving Greenwald and Omidyar, known as First Look Media. In a nutshell, there will be not one, but two business under the umbrella. First, there's a 501(c)(3) non-profit which will house the news and information website, which ...read more