Waldman nominated Apple, Google and Verizon. But some new economy winners are already deeply involving themselves in trying to secure journalism's future.
Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has purchased The Washington Post. And now eBay founder Pierre Omidyar is planning to launch an entirely new news organization starring journalist Glenn Greenwald, of Edward Snowden leak fame.
Since the digital revolution blew up the economic model of traditional newspaper journalism, there has been endless discussion about where the money might come from to foster the public service journalism that's critical in a democracy.
Well, part of the answer seems to be: very rich dudes. And rich digital dudes look like a particularly promising subset. There is no shortage of Silicon Valley luminaries who have become very, very wealthy. And clearly some of them are journalistically inclined.
Omidyar's interest in journalism has been clear for quite some time. He has supported various initiatives through philanthropy and three years ago launched Honolulu Civil Beat, an online, for-profit news outlet that covers Hawaii.
In a post on his Omidyar Group website, Omidyar said that over the summer he, too, had explored the possibility of buying The Washington Post. That was the catalyst for his new venture. It got him thinking about what he could do if he used a similar amount of money not to buy the Post but rather to build something from scratch. (Bezos bought the Post for $250 million.)
And while Greenwald is a high-profile get, Omidyar is not thinking just about investigative reporting. He says the as-yet-unnamed news outlet "will cover general interest news, with a core mission around supporting and empowering independent journalists across many sectors and beats. The team will bui! ld a media platform that elevates and supports these journalists and allows them to pursue the truth in their fields."
Omidyar stresses that the initiative is in its early stages. He says he doesn't know yet "how or when it will be rolled out, or what it will look like."
As the eBay founder explored his plunge into news, he decided to talk to Greenwald to determine what journalists like him "needed to do their jobs well." While Greenwald has been reporting for the British newspaper The Guardian and previously wrote for the website Salon, he is much more an independent operative than a typical staff reporter.
Turned out that Greenwald, his collaborator Laura Poitras and Jeremy Schall of The Nation magazine were also contemplating creating a journalism entity. So it made perfect sense for Omidyar to team up with them.
Greenwald, who calls his new if undefined gig a "once-in-a-career dream journalistic opportunity," is an example of a relatively new digital era phenomenon, the journalist as franchise. In July, ESPN lured statistics whiz Nate Silver away from The New York Times. Silver had won acclaim for his spot-on predictions about the 2012 presidential election on his FiveThirtyEight blog. And speaking of dream jobs, Silver's mission is to put together a team to cover sports, culture, economics and tech, not to mention appear on ABC News in campaign season.
Omidyar told New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, who writes the PressThink blog, that he and Greenwald haven't even talked about what the celebrity journalist's role will be. They just know they want to do this together.
Omidyar also told Rosen that the enterprise would be digital-only, and that his determination to launch it was intensified by concern over the Obama administration's harsh crackdown on leaks and the revelations of wholesale surveillance by the National Security Agency.
(I contacted Omidyar for an interview, but a spokeswoman told me that he wasn't granting any aside from h! is conver! sation with Rosen, whom he has consulted about the start-up. She referred me to Rosen's and Omidyar's posts.)
So, is this ownership by rich dudes a good thing or a bad thing? Depends on the rich dude. The Omidyar/Greenwald collaboration sounds very exciting. For one thing, $250 million is serious money. You can buy a lot of journalism with that.
Omidyar seems seriously interested in furthering the cause of good journalism. And Greenwald is obviously very smart and very driven. Yes, he has a political agenda, which is always troubling. But he has done an enormous public service with his work on the Snowden revelations about government snooping.
It reminds me of Bob Woodward's defense of using information from anonymous sources. The issue, he says, isn't the type of source, it's the quality of the information.
But the rich dude model certainly has its pitfalls. I started my journalism career at The Philadelphia Inquirer when it was owned by Walter S. Annenberg, later, the U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James. It was a mediocre-at-best paper that Annenberg used to reward his friends and punish his enemies.
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Today, the Inquirer is owned by not just one but by six rich dudes. And the ugly situation there, with bitter infighting pitting owner against owner and publisher against editor, is truly disheartening.
But make no mistake: The Omidyar emergence, along with forays into the newspaper business by Bezos, investor nonpareil Warren Buffett and free-spending Orange County Register owner Aaron Kushner, are very hopeful signs.
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