It isn’t alone in melding a for-profit to a non-profit: Rosen names the Guardian and ProPublica, for instance, as two journalistic institutions that meld non- and for-profit elements. The Guardian is a for-profit owned by a trust, tasked with maintaining its longevity. ProPublica is a non-profit that will publish investigations with corporations.

But First Look, Rosen writes, “is different. […] The entire operation is designed to support the mission of independent public service journalism, achieve sustainability and attract talent.” First Look is a symbiote. It's a technology division feeding a media division, which then empowers the technology division.

As my colleague Andrew Golis wrote on Twitter, “Omidyar is baking in as many subsidy models for investigative journalism as he can into the org structure.”

Companies are organized to produce technology, but their organization is a kind of technology, too. First Look belongs to an interesting moment where media companies are discovering new ways to organize themselves to more smartly approach the challenges of making and distributing news.

The Org-Tech Revolution

I wonder if we’re seeing the rise of the bespoke firm. I’m not alone in this. “I am half-expecting a Cambrian explosion of organisational forms over the next ~decade,” the British futurist Justin Pickard wrote in November. “The firm is a technology too.” (In the Cambrian explosion, simple organisms diversified into many of the loose types of animals we still see today. The eruption was rather quick, in geological terms, taking place roughly between 580 and 540 million years ago.)

Does First Look’s organizational structure show such a diversification is happening? Not by itself—but in the light of other recent organizational innovations, maybe.

The first involves the U.S. Open Data Institute, a project funded by the Knight Foundation. The U.S. ODI, as its called, is based off the British ODI, which was planned and is operated by Tim Berners-Lee. (That’s the same Berners-Lee who invented the worldwide web.) It’s meant to provide experts and money to steward the government’s digitization and publication of its legally public, but technologically closed-off, data. The U.S. ODI wants to create ecosystems and markets around the opened public data, and then go away and leave them to their own devices.

The American ODI is designed to disappear.

“We’re gonna term limit it, and we’re thinking that limit will be four years,” the institute’s founder told me when I talked to him in October. That is: In the best of circumstances, the U.S. ODI will scuttle itself in 2017.

An organization with a half-life. It’s not so far off from Spark Camp, a journalism meet-up—I hesitate to call it a conference—that brings a small group of people together to talk about a specific issue. Spark Camp calls itself a “pop-up think tank.”