Glenn Greenwald is leaving the Guardian this week to team up with documentarian/journalist Laura Poitras and journalist Jeremy Scahill in developing a new media venture — one that could change how journalism is understood and practiced. While it isn’t yet clear how this new venture will look, it has been described as a “very substantial new media outlet” and is reportedly being funded by eBay founder and philanthropist Pierre Omidyar.
Greenwald and Poitras, the two journalists who spearheaded the coverage of the National Security Agency’s survellience programme based on documents from Edward Snowden earlier this year, and Jeremy Scahill, a journalist with The Nation magazine, are in the process of creating a new mass media organisation that would cover general news and investigative journalism.
Omidyar has been quoted as saying that his decision to commit $250 million to the project has to do with his “rising concern about press freedoms in the United States and around the world” and that he hopes the project will promote “independent journalists with expertise, and a voice and a following”.
In an interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, Greenwald says,
[W]hat this is really about is being able to create a very well-funded, powerful, well-fortified institution that’s designed not to just tolerate that kind of journalism, but to enable it and protect it and strengthen it and empower it. And the people who we’re going to select are all going to be people who take the same view of adversarial journalism, that it’s about holding the most powerful factions accountable, fearlessly, and without regard to threats or repercussions from the government or corporate factions.
This new venture has the possibility of reframing the way journalism — and the act of funding journalists — is conceived.
Read more here:
Washington Post
The Nation
Photo attribution: George Skidmore
