Ken Silverstein is a former senior investigative reporter for First Look Media, as well as a veteran of Harper’s and the Los Angeles Times.

My first day at First Look Media was December 30, 2013. I was thrilled to go to work at what seemed like it was going to be the most exciting place in journalism.

In the wake of the Edward Snowden leaks, Pierre Omidyar, who had founded eBay, had recruited Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill to launch the first of what he hoped would be several online magazines focused around various subjects. First Look’s debut project was to be The Intercept, pitched as a place “to hold the most powerful governmental and corporate factions accountable.”


Back when I was hired, First Look and The Intercept were just getting started. It seemed like it was going to be a fantastic opportunity for journalists. I was told that I could basically create my own job and write investigative stories about anything I wanted. I knew at the time little about Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire who founded and funded First Look, but he wasn’t a big part of my decision-making.

I assumed Omidyar must be a decent guy if he was going to pour $250 million into a new journalism venture, as he promised. Given that the organization had been founded in the wake of the NSA surveillance scandal that Snowden had launched, it was clear from the start that First Look Media would be a muckracking, confrontational publication with a libertarian streak—distrustful of government power and moneyed interests. To start it, Omidyar promised $50 million to get it off the ground. With resources like that, it had tremendous promise.

Plus, I figured, it couldn’t be worse than my last job.

How wrong I was—on both counts.

During the summer of 2013 I had been offered a job at Al Jazeera’s investigative unit, where I’d been promised full independence. I took the job because I was worried about the future of journalism—and especially my future in it. It hadn’t worked out as promised; I only lasted two months, quitting after I came to believe that the network’s political agenda in the Middle East compromised my ability to do journalism.

First Look couldn’t be any worse than that, right?

The selling point to those who were recruited to First Look was tremendous resources and tremendous freedom to pursue “fearless, independent journalism.” An editor I’d worked with before, Eric Bates, recruited me—asking me to write up a memo describing my dream job, an investigative position that combined long-form work with quick hit pieces oriented to the news. Then First Look hired me and told me to do exactly what I’d laid out.

That much happened—I was able to pursue all sorts of great stories. Where First Look faltered, though, was actually publishing my work and the work of the other journalists it hired.

Over the next six months, First Look became a slowly unfolding disaster, not because of editorial meddling from the top, but because of what I came to believe was epic managerial incompetence. What I observed was that the Omidyar-led management could not complete the simplest tasks—approving budgets or hires—without months of internal debate and apparent anguish. The Intercept didn’t even begin publishing until last February. (We weren’t supposed to call it “Glenn Greenwald’s The Intercept” because a lot of other people worked there, including me for a bit, but everyone knew Glenn was the anchor of the project.) After a pause ordered by editor in chief John Cook to address its internal dysfunction, the site relaunched in July with a good, complicated story about how the NSA and the FBI had been monitoring a few Muslim-Americans in the United States. Yet I saw how difficult the story was to birth for its chief editor, John Cook, and he didn’t end up lasting long—before quitting and returning to Gawker.

I was ready to start writing, too, but the day-to-day at First Look was anything but functional. I would find and begin researching stories that Eric approved, but there was no way to publish them—the organization’s editing structure was so lacking and insignificant, and on at least three occasions I saw stories that I had the inside track on get published in other outlets. (For example, this story about a New York hedge fund wrapped up with brutal African dictator Robert Mugabe. This was, as I recall, the first story approved by Eric—but we lost it many months later.) Not only did we produce virtually no work, but there was no real push to produce work from management. For all of the bean counting and expense account-approving that Omidyar’s organizational structure imposed on us, they were shockingly disinterested in the actual journalism.

Employees were initially told that we were free to spend whatever we needed for our reporting and the company simply asked that we spend its money responsibly, as we would if it were our own. But soon new orders came down from management that made it difficult to pay for a source’s drinks—and to report, at least in Washington, it is pretty much required that you be able to take sources out for drinks to have discreet, relaxed conversations. Over time, management began closely scrutinizing expense reports. Some of us became so frustrated, and intimidated, that we decided to simply stop expensing some legitimate reporting costs because it wasn’t worth the hassle of trying to get reimbursed.

From top to bottom, the company’s culture centered on Omidyar, an odd reverence that I thought not only undeserved, but outright embarrassing. This is a guy who got rich mostly through good timing in the tech business, not because he has an outstanding track record in journalism. Now that he’s rich, he is surrounded by Yes Men and Women who tell him he’s a genius—and while that might be fine in the business world, it’s not good for journalism. He was good at staying out of the journalism itself, but a cult of personality existed around him internally that disrupted the whole organization.

Meanwhile, there were frequent changes in top editorial and managerial positions—some employees quit and others were demoted or promoted with no explanation I saw to the staff, and top management was so aloof that it was hard to figure out who was in charge. Meanwhile, top managers would periodically gather to meet at a vast estate Omidyar owns near Las Vegas to make decisions about the organization’s future. Yet I frequently spoke to colleagues who, like me, had no idea where our ship was heading and felt enormously insecure about the company because there was so little communication. Instead, there would be periodic staff meetings where Omidyar and others would assure us that everything was going smashingly but provide no details, only platitudes about his commitment to journalism.

As to those staff meetings, Pierre would sometimes attend in person in New York—or remotely by video. I think I only met him twice in person, but I remember invariably he would say during these staff meetings, “You probably want to know what I think” and then talk about something, usually how much he loves journalism and the First Amendment. The company seemed to me to spend far too much time on all of the things other than actually producing journalism—obsessing over policies, procedures and meetings when what we actually needed to do was publish some stories. When I was hired I was told that the whole premise of First Look was that it would hire good reporters, get out of their way and let them do good work. That is pretty much the exact reverse of what happened.

I remember during one meeting speaking up out of exasperation because we were so far behind schedule, saying something like, “Journalism is not rocket science,” meaning, “For God’s sake, writing and editing and fact checking and posting stories on a website is really a pretty easy thing to do.” And Pierre, clearly annoyed, replied by saying something like, “No, it’s not, but it is rocket science to find an audience.” True to a point, but you can’t find an audience without posting stories for people to read.

***

The end of my journalism dream came as I watched Omidyar’s team kill their second baby. As The Intercept was getting going in fits and starts, First Look created what was supposed to be the company’s second publication and recruited Matt Taibbi to run Racket. Matt’s idea was to cover politics and business and culture with a combination of good, in-depth reporting combined with a wicked sense of satire—in other words, the type of work that Matt is famous for having produced at Rolling Stone and elsewhere. He hired some incredible writers, including Alex Pareene, Edith Zimmerman and other insanely talented people. It was no small endeavor.

After having floated freely within the organization for my first seven months, Matt invited me to join the Racket team too, and I was thrilled to accept. During my short time at Racket, we talked about how we should have the courage to write whatever we wanted—and not to worry about whether First Look management liked what we did or whether we offended potential future employers. At bottom, that is the true formula to produce fearless, independent journalism. You will never produce fearless, independent journalism if you live in fear of angering your media boss or to please your sources or even your friends.

But again First Look’s management intervened. I won’t repeat the whole story of Racket because you can read that elsewhere, but I formally joined it in July. To cut a long story short, the decisions and meddling by First Look left Matt Taibbi no choice but to resign this past fall. I am sensitive to the allegations of gender bias that swirled around his departure, but I don't think that’s what happened. Matt may have been rude to a female employee—though I don’t know that—but from what I saw of him I believe that if he was rude, he would also have been rude to her if she had been a he. Matt was, to my eyes, a great journalist and a good boss. It’s a shame we’ll never know what Racket could have been if it had ever been allowed to publish.

After Matt left, Pierre and John Temple, who had worked with Pierre before and was named in June First Look’s “President, Audience and Products”—a title that seemed to have precious little to do with a journalism job—told the rest of us that perhaps we could all continue working on a version of Racket without Matt. Management left us, though, to figure out our own roadmap of a way forward, in effect telling a bunch of writers and editors to save their own jobs by creating a website proposal in only a few short weeks—even though none of us had ever created a website before, and even though Matt, Racket’s original visionary, was now gone. None of us really believed in the viability of the project, and in the end it was clear First Look didn’t either.

When First Look fired the remaining staff, it told them to clear out of the office immediately, that very day, to take their things and get out. According to the colleagues who I talked with, First Look gave them three months severance. And what’s even more amazing is that they fired everyone and killed the project two days before Thanksgiving. They just couldn’t wait until after Thanksgiving. I guess the only surprise is that they didn’t give all the fired employees a canned turkey as part of their severance.

The fact that First Look hired so many talented people to create Racket, spent more than a million dollars on it, and in the end fired everyone before Racket ever published a single story must stand as one of the greatest squanderings of money and leadership ineptitude in modern journalism.

The only refugee from the Racket who didn’t leave or was fired was me; First Look offered me a job at The Intercept. I kept the same title I already had—senior investigative reporter—and my new position was identical to the one I had been hired for originally. (I still feel badly about accepting that position with The Intercept; at the time I worried that my daughter would not be able to continue college if I left. So I have my own guilt here, for not having the courage to do the right thing back then, which would have been to quit immediately.)

Not long after I went to work for The Intercept, Betsy Reed was hired as editor-in-chief to replace John Cook, and I thought things would get better. They did, a little bit, but not by much. Any rational person would have been driven crazy by the continued endless and needless delays at First Look. There was no editing structure to be found—and the site was so short-staffed on editing that Glenn sent around an email suggesting that most of us writers take temporary, rotating stints as editors—including himself.

There were plenty of writers, but it wasn’t at all clear what they were supposed to do or who would edit their work. The writers were left to roam on their own, absent almost any oversight or structure, and many seemed to disappear into nebulous, long-term projects. Little content ever made it onto the website.

Journalism’s not rocket science, but it still seemed to take forever to get anything done at The Intercept. I did manage to publish a few stories beginning mostly in December—mainly because I had a bunch of stories pretty much ready to run at Racket before it was killed.

But before then, because things were so bad at First Look with delays and ongoing managerial ineptitude and the demoralized staff, I published—with management’s permission—a story with Vice about a sleazy Panamanian law firm that allegedly helps dictators and corrupt businesspeople launder their money. (That firm, which denies its role in laundering money, is in a lot of hot water at the moment, not because of my story, but I’d like to think my story helped.) This story was originally meant to run in Racket and then, later, at The Intercept, but even though I’d traveled to Panama last March to report the story on Omidyar’s dime, no one at The Intercept had ever edited it. I finally insisted on publishing it elsewhere, just so it would see the light of day. I also wrote a story about George Clooney and South Sudan that The Intercept could have published, but chose not to, so it ran at Gawker.

The delays were caused in part by management’s execution of Racket, which left me with a bunch of stories and no place to post them. But even after I moved over to The Intercept, I struggled to get any work published because of the shortage of editors and general organizational chaos.

All I ask in journalism is that I have the freedom to publish the best, most true pieces that I can. I think that as journalists we should be skeptical of everyone—corporations, governments, non-profits and media. I think you need to be especially critical of your own point of view and of people you admire and be willing to write negatively about them with as much enthusiasm as you do about your “enemies” (of which I very obviously have none). All I ask is that I have the freedom to pursue my reporting as I see fit—and it’s served me well at Harper’s, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications over my long career.

But at First Look, we were never able to be fearless. We couldn’t do anything, because we spent so much time in pointless meetings and being slowed down, when we wrote anything, by a lack of support from management and the dire shortage of editors to actually oversee and work with the writers. We were just lost.

The culture at First Look was just too strange. And fearless wasn’t a word that would factor into our corporate life. At last year’s holiday party, two of our fiercely “independent” staffers “interviewed” Pierre Omidyar and asked him what he did in the morning. Since you are all hanging on the edge of your seats, he drinks tea and reads stuff, the New York Times and other things and then The Intercept was about No. 5 (he claims). The whole thing was sad.

The beginning of the end for me, though, came as The Intercept launched into what would turn out to be basically the biggest story of its short existence: The Serial chronicles.

In my final months, I helped edit and write a few stories for The Intercept with Natasha Vargas-Cooper about the wildly popular podcast Serial. Natasha landed two key interviews with figures in the murder case and she wrote a series of stories that I helped edit and shared a co-byline on two of them. The stories challenged, directly and indirectly, the narrative laid out in the unexpected podcast hit by the makers of This American Life. The podcast’s narrative followed the investigation and prosecution of Baltimore teen Adnan Syed, who was convicted and is serving a life sentence for the murder by strangulation of a teenage girl (and who dumped her body in a park in Baltimore). Serial’s thesis was straightforward: Syed did not get a fair trial.

Our stories, though, showed the opposite—documenting the work of the prosecutor and the star witness. Given the viral success of the show, our follow-up stories were a huge success—possibly the biggest thing The Intercept has ever published. They were, though, hugely controversial inside our organization. Why wouldn’t a huge editorial success be celebrated inside The Intercept? Because we were siding with The Man.

Now I believe the American justice system is badly flawed and often racist, but in this instance, I firmly believe, the system worked. I believe Adnan Syed murdered Hae Min Lee and was rightly prosecuted for it.

But I came to realize that the system working correctly—and the right people going to jail—isn’t a good narrative to tell at The Intercept.

Publishing the Serial stories was a huge headache: There were constant delays and frustrations getting them out, even after it became clear they were drawing huge traffic. Our internal critics believed that Natasha and I had taken the side of the prosecutors—and hence the state. That support was unacceptable at a publication that claimed it was entirely independent and would be relentlessly adversarial towards The Man. That held true even in this case, when The Man successfully prosecuted a killer and sent him to jail.

Some colleagues, like Jeremy Scahill, were upset after the first installment of Natasha’s interviews with Jay, the state’s flawed-but-convincing key witness, and our co-bylined two-part interview with the lead prosecutor, Kevin Urick, both of whom had refused to speak to Sarah Koenig for her Serial podcast. Jeremy even threatened to quit over the second installment, according to two of my colleagues who witnessed what they described as his “temper tantrum” in the New York office. He told them he couldn’t believe that we’d so uncritically accepted the state’s view of the murder—even though our stories were backed up by our own research, our unique reporting and our reading of court documents. One day at the office, frustrated, Natasha wrote “Team Adnan” on a sign on Jeremy’s office door.

The internal objections delayed the second installment of our interview with Urick by a full week. And even though both Glenn and Jeremy aren’t technically editors, they reviewed the second article in advance of publication. I asked them by email to cease and told them it was inappropriate for them to review our work—we answered only to our editors, not to them. Meanwhile, as the delay mounted day by day, Natasha and I (and the prosecutor, Urick, whose exemplary work we defended) were hung out to dry—our story only partially told—as social media falsely but relentlessly attacked it on the dumbest grounds.

Natasha left The Intercept within weeks of the Serial chronicles. I wouldn’t be much longer. The Serial saga was just a sign of things to come.

***

The final straw came last Friday when The Intercept delayed, predictably, another of my stories, about a prominent U.S. architect of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I quit that day (officially I was terminated on Monday). I went to First Look to do fearless journalism—but I found I couldn’t navigate any journalism, fearless or not, through the layers of what I saw as inept management, oversight and editing.

It was time to go.

My story, though, doesn’t end there.

On Wednesday, I got an email from First Look asking me to Fedex the company my corporate laptop. I told them to tell me what is it worth and they can deduct it from what they owe me in expenses and vacation time. But what I love is that a company that opposes NSA spying apparently wants a “disgruntled” former employee’s laptop so they can see what’s on it.

I’m looking forward to ending up somewhere where I can do the fearless journalism that I hoped I’d be doing at First Look. I’m not at all concerned for my future. I’ve talked to several editors elsewhere about jobs and have a book contract underway. I hope you will continue to read my work. I don’t care whether you like it or not, just read it.

Until then, though, I want to continue to follow the model of other journalists I admire—people like, in alphabetical order: Leah Finnegan, Paul Ford, Suki Kim, Natasha Vargas-Cooper and Edith Zimmerman. Journalism, at its best, is a great profession, and you’ll have the opportunity to read more of my writing in the near future—including my final Intercept story that they never published.

Correction: An earlier version of this story said The Intercept did not start publishing until July 2014. It started publishing in February 2014.