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Ken Silverstein: Intercept stifled 'Serial' reporting

The Intercept media executives and staff weren’t fans of their own reporting on the case featured in the wildly popular podcast Serial, delaying stories because they were “siding with The Man,” former Intercept senior investigative reporter Ken Silverstein wrote in POLITICO Magazine.

The Serial podcast documented the trial and conviction of Adnan Syed for the murder of Hae Min Lee in Baltimore, and suggested that perhaps Syed was not given a fair trial. But key interviews and reporting done by Intercept reporter Natasha Vargas-Cooper suggested that the process was fair. Vargas-Cooper interviewed a key witness in the case and the prosecutor, both of whom declined to be interviewed by Serial.

Intercept co-founder Jeremy Scahill was upset by the first installment of Vargas-Cooper’s piece, Silverstein reported.

“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,” Silverstein wrote.

Scahill threw a “temper tantrum” at the New York offices of the Intercept, unaccepting that the reporters had “so uncritically accepted the state’s view of the murder.”

At one point Vargas-Cooper wrote “Team Adnan” on a sign on Scahill’s office door.

The friction delayed the second installment of Vargas-Cooper’s reporting by a week, as Scahill and Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald edited the piece, despite the fact they weren’t Vargas-Cooper or Silverstein’s editors.

Vargas-Cooper left The Intercept weeks later and Silverstein would soon follow. He resigned last week.

Silverstein further contends that Intercept parent company First Look Media, which launched with the promise of a $250 million dollar investment from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and high hopes for nearly a dozen stand-alone digital magazines, has devolved into a chaotic and tumultuous media story of Silicon Valley executives attempting to run a news business. Its second digital magazine after The Intercept, called Racket, never even officially launched as editor Matt Taibbi butted heads with executives and eventually quit. Despite having spent $1 million on Racket, according to Silverstein, the entire staff was eventually fired and the project folded.

“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,” Silverstein wrote.

Stories of First Look’s managerial problems are already well-known fodder in media circles; from managers giving extra scrutiny to every line on an expense report to an unpopular internal communication service called Asana the employees were forced to use.

“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,” Silverstein wrote. “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.”

Read Silverstein’s full piece here.

UPDATE 12:40p.m.: A First Look spokesperson emails this statement from The Intercept:

Ken Silverstein joined the staff of The Intercept this past December, roughly two months ago. Last week, in the wake of repeated conflicts with Intercept editors, researchers and fact checkers, he resigned. We wish him the best of luck in the future

Hadas Gold is a reporter at Politico.