Matt Taibbi, who joined First Look Media just seven months ago, left the company on Tuesday. His departure -- which he describes as a refusal to accept a work reassignment, and the company describes as a resignation -- was the culmination of months of contentious disputes with First Look founder Pierre Omidyar, chief operating officer Randy Ching, and president John Temple over the structure and management of Racket, the digital magazine Taibbi was hired to create. Those disputes were exacerbated by a recent complaint from a Racket employee about Taibbi's behavior as a manager.
Omidyar has publicly and privately pledged multiple times that First Look will never interfere with the stories produced by its journalists. He has adhered to that commitment with both The Intercept and Racket, and Taibbi has been clear that he was free to shape Racket's journalism fully in his image. His vision was a hard-hitting, satirical magazine in the style of the old Spy that would employ Taibbi's facility for merciless ridicule, humor, and parody to attack Wall Street and the corporate world. First Look was fully behind that vision.
Taibbi's dispute with his bosses instead centered on differences in management style and the extent to which First Look would influence the organizational and corporate aspects of his role as editor-in-chief. Those conflicts were rooted in a larger and more fundamental culture clash that has plagued the project from the start: A collision between the First Look executives, who by and large come from a highly structured Silicon Valley corporate environment, and the fiercely independent journalists who view corporate cultures and management-speak with disdain. That divide is a regular feature in many newsrooms, but it was exacerbated by First Look's avowed strategy of hiring exactly those journalists who had cultivated reputations as anti-authoritarian iconoclasts.
The Intercept, through months of disagreements and negotiations with First Look over the summer, was able to resolve most of these conflicts; as a result, it now has a sizable budget, operational autonomy, and a team of talented journalists, editors, research specialists, and technologists working collaboratively and freely in the manner its founders always envisioned.
When First Look was launched last October, it was grounded in two principles: one journalistic, the other organizational. First, journalists would enjoy absolute editorial freedom and journalistic independence. Second, the newsroom would avoid rigid top-down hierarchies and instead would be driven by the journalists and their stories.
But First Look and the editorial staff it hired quickly learned that it is much easier to talk about such high-minded, abstract principles than it is to construct an organization around them. The decision to create a new editorial model left space for confusion, differing perspectives, and misaligned expectations.
Taibbi and other journalists who came to First Look believed they were joining a free-wheeling, autonomous, and unstructured institution. What they found instead was a confounding array of rules, structures, and systems imposed by Omidyar and other First Look managers on matters both trivial--which computer program to use to internally communicate, mandatory regular company-wide meetings, mandated use of a "responsibility assignment matrix" called a "RASCI," popular in business-school circles for managing projects -- as well as more substantive issues.
The lack of autonomous budgets, for instance, meant that in many cases Omidyar was personally signing off on--and occasionally objecting to -- employee expense reports for taxi rides and office supplies. Both Cook, The Intercept's editor-in-chief, and Taibbi chafed at what they regarded as onerous intrusions into their hiring authority.
Months of constant wrangling, bubbling resentments, and low-level sniping over those perceived infringements began to explode into the open in the spring and summer. In April, First Look executive editor Eric Bates told Cook and Taibbi that Omidyar had imposed a three-month "hiring freeze" on both magazines in order to allow the company to figure out its directions and "values." (Omidyar later told staffers that there was no freeze, and that his instructions had been misunderstood.) Both editors were in the middle of recruiting their staffs, and the restriction was viewed internally as emblematic of the arbitrary and excessive authority being exercised by First Look over the magazines' operations.
A few months later, over the summer, Omidyar told employees that he was "re-tooling" the company's focus and building a laboratory environment to foster the development of new technologies for delivering and consuming news--the idea, he said at the time, was to orient the company more toward "products," as opposed to "content." While he said that he was "as committed as ever" to both The Intercept and to Taibbi's project, Omidyar made clear that there were no plans to launch any more digital magazines in the near term, and that the idea of a flagship site had been scrapped altogether.
Most of the journalists hired by First Look by that point were under the impression that they would be joining a large, ambitious, general-interest news organization, and the shift left many staffers deeply concerned about the company's commitment to journalism and confused about its mission.
In June, Taibbi, Greenwald, Poitras, and Scahill wrote a joint letter to Omidyar outlining their principal grievances -- the lack of clear budgets and repeated and arbitrary restrictions on hiring -- and making clear that a failure to resolve them would jeopardize the feasibility of both projects.
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