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.