“Sanity Returned”

Pierre Omidyar’s office in Honolulu occupies the second floor of a low-slung and unassuming commercial building, across from a park and a school. Down the street is a row of simple restaurants, and when Omidyar is in town, the billionaire founder of eBay often walks from his office to his favorite lunch spot, a place that he prefers not to have named, partly because he loves it and partly for reasons of security.

One morning in June 2013, just days after the first stories based on Edward Snowden’s classified-document trove started appearing in The Guardian and The Washington Post, Omidyar received a call there from the Washington Post Company’s chairman and C.E.O., Don Graham, who wanted to talk to him about buying the newspaper. The two had recently exchanged messages about the Post but had never before spoken directly. Omidyar was intrigued by Graham’s passionate pitch for the kind of public-service journalism the Post produces. The two men continued to correspond over the summer. During those months, Omidyar read the autobiography of Graham’s mother, Katharine Graham, who had been the publisher of the Post when the newspaper ran its stories on Watergate and the Pentagon Papers. As a memoir reader, he was all business: “I tried to skim through some of the personal stories, just focus on the newspaper ones,” Omidyar told me when I visited him in Hawaii last fall. “I got excited about it.”

But it was not to be. In the end, Graham named a price that Omidyar thought too high. There was a larger issue, too. Omidyar is admittedly conflict-averse, and when considering the Post, “I just remembered instances in my history where when people aren’t fully aligned, when they haven’t bought into the vision, it’s really difficult and it’s actually a little bit draining. It’s not something I look forward to dealing with in the morning. I thought about myself actually in the role of leading a cultural transformation—that would mean dealing with talented people who fundamentally disagreed with me in some cases.” When he imagined that scenario, he realized that he wanted to avoid it. “I said, O.K., fine, that’s maybe not a great idea.” He indulged a small laugh. “Ultimately I think sanity returned.”

Don Graham ended up selling the Post and some affiliated publications to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos for $250 million. But the discussions with Graham had solidified Omidyar’s resolve to dive deeper into the world of journalism. Soon afterward, Omidyar pledged to start his own news organization and match Bezos’s investment in the Post. He enlisted two of the journalists who had reported on the Snowden documents: Glenn Greenwald, an aggressive and sometimes strident columnist and former lawyer, who had been writing a column for *The Guardian’*s U.S. edition, and Laura Poitras, an Academy Award-nominated documentary-film maker, who had been the first journalist to take Snowden seriously, and who did the most to bring his revelations to light. They were joined by Jeremy Scahill, another Academy Award-nominated documentary-film maker and a writer for The Nation, who had also cultivated an aggressive persona and strong relationships with national-security whistle-blowers. Omidyar announced that the new endeavor would have a “core mission around supporting and empowering independent journalists across many sectors and beats.”

As Omidyar has by now discovered, starting an organization from scratch was hardly a safeguard against dealing with people who fundamentally disagreed with him. First Look Media, as Omidyar’s enterprise has come to be called, is beset by staff turmoil and dissatisfaction. One of its most high-profile journalists, former Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi, left in October after clashing with Omidyar and his deputies, amid allegations of insubordination and possibly gender-based hostility on Taibbi’s part. John Cook, editor in chief of what is so far First Look’s only publication, The Intercept, is leaving the site at the end of 2014 to return to his former employer, the gossip-and-news site Gawker. These departures have laid bare how Omidyar’s process-driven approach to management clashed with the ways of the independent-minded journalists he hired. In many respects, the current turmoil was entirely predictable. “He hired a newsroom of unmanageables,” one veteran newspaper editor told me. More specifically, Omidyar is attempting to create a news organization with the help of individuals who have made their careers eschewing—when not mocking—news organizations of all stripes.