Wednesday morning, Christiane Amanpour said she’d confirmed an earlier report from Reuters that said eBay founder Pierre Omidyar is funding Glenn Greenwald’s new journalism venture.
eBay founder @pierre Omidyar tells me he will PERSONALLY fund new online mass media venture, teaming up with @ggreenwald et al
— Christiane Amanpour (@camanpour) October 16, 2013
Filmmaker Laura Poitras and Nation reporter Jeremy Scahill are among the people who may be working with Greenwald on the site, Paul Farhi reported in The Washington Post (Michael Calderone seems to have confirmed they’ll be involved).
BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith and Rosie Gray Tuesday broke the news that Greenwald is leaving the Guardian for what he called a “once-in-a-career dream journalistic opportunity.”
“We are, of course, disappointed by Glenn’s decision to move on,” the Guardian said in a statement.
Omidyar, 46, founded Democracy Fund and is the publisher of the news site Honolulu Civil Beat. He is also one of the funders of PunditFact, a new project of PolitiFact (which is owned by the Tampa Bay Times, which in turn is owned by Poynter).
Greenwald will set up offices in New York, San Francisco and Washington D.C., but he’ll remain in Brazil, where he lives, and bring some staff there. When Greenwald spoke with The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple yesterday, Greenwald declined to say where the new venture’s headquarters would be.
The new venture will be “a general media outlet and news site — it’s going to have sports and entertainment and features,” Greenwald told Smith. “I’m working on the whole thing but the political journalism unit is my focus.”
Greenwald certainly won’t be the first journalist to make the leap from reporting on things to running things. Yesterday, Politico co-founder Jim VandeHei talked with Brent Lang about his big promotion Monday to CEO of both Politico and Capital New York.
“I’ve been here from the beginning,” VandeHei told The Wrap. “I co-founded Politico seven years ago, so it’s not like I’m going from being a beat reporter at the Wall Street Journal to being the CEO of the company.”
On Twitter, The Wall Street Journal’s Farhad Manjoo noted a particular irony about the way news of Greenwald’s new venture broke:
It's poetic that Greenwald's new venture was leaked.
— Farhad Manjoo (@fmanjoo) October 15, 2013
