October 25-2013
EBay founder Pierre Omidyar has decided to plunge into the struggling news industry with his own mass media organization.
He is drawing many comparison with fellow his technology baron, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who just paid $250 million for The Washington Post.
But unlike Bezos, the Iranian-American Omidyar says he aims to build his mass media organization from scratch. And, controversially, his first recruits are the journalists who exposed the US government’s cyber surveillance programs, using documents leaked by former spy agency contractor Edward Snowden.
They are Glenn Greenwald, currently with The Guardian of Britain, and Laura Poitras, a documentary filmmaker. But it isn’t clear what they will do. Greenwald told The New York Times he would not be the editor.
The new venture puts Omidyar, 46, in the public eye after many years of relatively low profile philanthropic and investment activities. While he has long supported efforts to promote transparency and accountability in government, including a local news website in his home state of Hawaii, Omidyar suggested he is prepared to spend as much as Bezos did in buying the Post to take those efforts to a new level.
“I want to find ways to convert mainstream readers into engaged citizens,” Omidyar wrote in a blog post last Wednesday. But just how he will do that remains a mystery to the public—and possibly to Omidyar as well.
Established news organizations are struggling to find a viable financial model as print advertising and circulation plummet while online advertising dollars migrate to Google and automated ad exchanges that drive prices down. He has yet to offer any clues about his business strategy.
Media investments generally do not make good investments, David Cowan, a partner at Bessemer Ventures, told Reuters. “I’m pretty sure Pierre doesn’t think that a news startup is the best way to get richer,” he said.
Born in France to Iranian parents, Omidyar grew up in the Washington, DC, area, with a stint in Hawaii. He graduated from Tufts University near Boston in 1988 with a degree in computer science, and moved to Silicon Valley.
While working as a software engineer, Omidyar came up with the idea for eBay in 1995 and worked on it as a hobby until it became big enough for him to quit his day job.
When eBay went public three years later, the then 31-year-old Omidyar’s stake was valued at $611 million by the end of the trading day. He still owns almost 9 percent of what is now a $70 billion company, making him eBay’s top shareholder. Forbes pegs his wealth at $8.5 billion.
Omidyar serves as eBay’s chairman, but has not been involved in its day-to-day operations for years.
During the summer, Omidyar considered purchasing The Washington Post, he wrote in his blog. While the Post was sold to Bezos in August, the process “got me thinking about what kind of social impact could be created if a similar investment was made in something entirely new, built from the ground up,” he wrote.
Those musings led to his latest project, which he is billing as “My Next Adventure in Journalism.”
Omidyar Network, the investment firm founded by Omidyar and his wife, Pam, in 2004, has backed some 25 organizations dealing with news and government transparency.
“Pierre gets journalism,” said John Temple, founding editor of Honolulu Civil Beat, the news site launched by Omidyar in 2010. “He’s passionate about it and knows how to create an environment and culture where journalists feel energized and empowered.”
Omidyar’s comments on Twitter in recent months show an increasing discomfort with the workings of the US government.
“There goes freedom of association,” he tweeted earlier this week, linking to an article in The Washington Post about the National Security Agency collecting email address books.
But in his Wednesday blog post, Omidyar emphasized his new endeavor would go beyond investigative reporting, and would “cover general interest news, with a core mission around supporting and empowering independent journalists across many sectors and beats.”
To some extent, Omidyar seems to be shifting what he has been trying with Honolulu Civil Beat to a broader stage.
Civil Beat aimed to create a new online journalism model with paid subscriptions and respectful comment threads. Patti Epler, current editor of Civil Beat, said a policy of requiring people to log in via Facebook before they post a comment has encouraged a less strident tone than at many news organizations.