[from First Look Media website]
First Look Media is a new-model media company devoted to supporting independent voices across all platforms, from fearless investigative journalism and documentary filmmaking to smart, provocative entertainment. Launched in 2013 by eBay founder and philanthropist Pierre Omidyar, First Look operates as both a studio and digital media company.
Motto: Entertainment with something on its mind
Partial List of Projects (as production company):
Risk Feature documentary 2016 Laura Poitras
Spotlight Feature narrative 2015 Tom McCarthy
God Is An Artist Short narrative 2014 Dustin Guy Defa
Company Size: 51 – 200
Founded: 2013
Staff:
Pierre Omidyar Founder/CEO
Michael Bloom President
Josh Epstein Executive Vice President/Chief Business Officer
Gregg Bernard Senior Vice President, Business Development
Nicolas Borenstein Director, Programming & Content
Adam Pincus Executive Vice President, Programming & Content
Bill Gannon Executive Editor
Lisa Failla Senior Vice President, People & Culture
Morgan Marquis-Boire Director of Security
Jeffrey O’Connell Executive Vice President, Technology
About Pierre Omidyar, Founder and CEO
Pierre Omidyar is a French-born Iranian-American entrepreneur and philanthropist. He is the founder of the eBay auction site where he served as Chairman from 1998 to 2015. He became a billionaire at the age of 31 with eBay’s 1998 initial public offering (IPO). Omidyar and his wife Pamela are well-known philanthropists who founded Omidyar Network in 2004 in order to expand their efforts beyond nonprofits to include for-profits and public policy. Since 2010, Omidyar has been involved in online journalism as the head of investigative reporting and public affairs news service Honolulu Civil Beat.[4] In 2013, he announced that he would create and finance First Look Media, a journalism venture in collaboration with journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill.
Facebook (320 likes): https://www.facebook.com/
Twitter (12.7K followers): https://twitter.com/
LinkedIn (588 followers): https://www.linkedin.com/
In the Media:
Pierre Omidyar’s First Look Media and Slate are teaming up on podcasts, starting with W. Kamau Bell | Recode | June 27, 2016
First Look Media, the politically progressive media company funded by billionaire and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, has been dipping its toes in a bunch of different media projects.
This week, First Look is releasing the first episode of its newest project: A political comedy podcast co-hosted by W. Kamau Bell and Hari Kondabolu called “Politically Re-Active.” Both are lefty stand-up comics, and you might recognize Bell’s name from his FXX show “Totally Biased,” which ended its run in 2013.
Their podcast’s first episode debuts on Wednesday, June 29; here’s a quick promo that will give you an idea of what it’s like.
The podcast, First Look’s first, is a joint effort from First Look and Slate.com’s podcast network Panoply, which makes the shows of high-profile people like Malcolm Gladwell and Vox.com Editor in Chief Ezra Klein*.
It has been a busy few months for First Look. The company recently relaunched the comics vertical The Nib (which used to be run on and by Medium), and the Intercept — its national security and politics site co-founded by Glenn Greenwald — took home a National Magazine Award for its columns from imprisoned journalist Barrett Brown.
Though virtually every major digital media company — Recode proprietor Vox Media included — is adding podcasting bits to their business, the real game is video.
First Look produced last year’s Oscar-winner “Spotlight,” and they’re funding other video projects like docu-series with Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. The most recent movie from Laura Poitras, filmmaker and Intercept co-founder, premiered at Cannes last month. It’s gotten good reviews so far.
* Vox.com and Recode are both owned by Vox Media.
Snowden Journalist’s New Venture to Be Bankrolled by eBay Founder | The New York Times | Oct 11, 2013
For years, the tech billionaire Pierre M. Omidyar has been experimenting with ways to promote serious journalism, searching for the proper media platform to support with the fortune he earned as the founder of eBay. He has made grants to independent media outlets in Africa and government watchdog groups in the United States. In a more direct effort, he created a news Web site in Hawaii, his home state.
Then last summer, The Washington Post came calling in its pursuit of a buyer. The Graham family ended up selling The Post to a different tech billionaire, Jeffrey P. Bezos of Amazon. But the experience, Mr. Omidyar wrote on his blog on Wednesday, “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.”
Mr. Omidyar also confirmed that he would be personally financing just such a new “mass media” venture, where he will be joined by the journalist Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian, the British daily. Mr. Greenwald gained notoriety this summer when he reported on the revelations about National Security Agency surveillance contained in papers leaked by Edward J. Snowden.
The details of the project are vague. “I don’t yet know how or when it will be rolled out, or what it will look like,” Mr. Omidyar wrote.
What is clear is that Mr. Greenwald will be there, and he is expected to be joined by Laura Poitras, the documentary filmmaker who was the crucial conduit between Mr. Snowden and Mr. Greenwald.
Together, Mr. Greenwald and Ms. Poitras possess a vast trove of documents from Mr. Snowden related to government surveillance and other secret matters. Mr. Greenwald has made it clear that he has much more material from Mr. Snowden to go through and many articles yet to write.
That means that Mr. Omidyar and his media site could well be in the middle of the tussle between the government and news groups over how to balance a free press against concerns about national security, perhaps making him a new adversary for agencies trying to prevent the disclosure of secret information.
Mr. Greenwald stressed in an interview Tuesday night that he would not be the editor or manager of the site, saying, “I will be doing the journalism.”
Mr. Omidyar wrote on Wednesday that the project was something he “would be personally and directly involved in outside of my other efforts as a philanthropist.”
Mr. Omidyar and Mr. Greenwald came together after developing a growing respect that was built around shared causes like protection for journalists and a revulsion at government surveillance tactics.
Mr. Omidyar — who declined an interview request but released a statement and spoke to the New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen — describes a happy coincidence: just as he was looking to start his project, Mr. Greenwald and Ms. Poitras, along with the reporter and author Jeremy Scahill, “were already on a path to create an online space to support independent journalists.”
“We had a lot of overlap in terms of our ideas, and decided to join forces,” he wrote.
Mr. Rosen, on his blog, outlined some of Mr. Omidyar’s thinking: while Mr. Greenwald, Ms. Poitras and Mr. Scahill have focused on national security and United States foreign policy, the new project will be of more general interest. Mr. Rosen, paraphrasing Mr. Omidyar, writes that the project would not be a niche product, and that it would cover sports, business, entertainment and technology.
When asked how large his financial commitment would be, Mr. Rosen writes, Mr. Omidyar referred to the $250 million it would have taken to buy The Post as a starting point.
Mr. Omidyar was born in Paris to Iranians, and was raised mostly around Washington. He created the original software for eBay’s online sales system in 1995. The company became a runaway success that changed Mr. Omidyar’s life beyond the billions he eventually made in eBay stock. Creating a mostly unregulated commerce system where strangers could successfully transact with others taught him that “at the end of the day people are trying to do the right thing,” as he said to a gathering of nonprofit groups in Hawaii in 2011.
Mr. Omidyar, 45, is chairman of eBay, but for more than a decade has not been active in the day-to-day running of the organization.
He decided to devote some of his fortune to philanthropy, but has said he was discouraged by traditional models, which he says can often reward bad outcomes. He named his major philanthropic organization the Omidyar Network to avoid connotations of being a charity, and has made many donations aimed at creating self-sustaining businesses.
He has also sought to have an impact commensurate with what he feels his wealth can accomplish, one that his local news site, Honolulu Civil Beat, couldn’t satisfy. The new venture apparently is the latest manifestation of his ambition to create a big, important media property.
The Twitter streams of Mr. Omidyar and Mr. Greenwald show that they had been moving toward each other over the last year. Mr. Omidyar frequently reposts Twitter messages from Mr. Greenwald about concerns like protecting journalists from government prosecution. One Twitter conversation about the Snowden documents culminated with Mr. Omidyar writing to Mr. Greenwald, “you’ve been the most consistent and knowledgeable reporter on illegal (and now supposed legal) wiretapping since Bush disclosure.”
Here’s Who’s Backing Glenn Greenwald’s New Website | The Huffington Post | Oct 15, 2013
WASHINGTON, Oct 15 (Reuters) – Glenn Greenwald, who has made headlines around the world with his reporting on U.S. electronic surveillance programs, is leaving the Guardian newspaper to join a new media venture funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, according to people familiar with the matter.
Greenwald, who is based in Brazil and was among the first to report information provided by one-time U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden, wrote in a blog post on Tuesday that he was presented with a “once-in-a-career dream journalistic opportunity” that he could not pass up.
He did not reveal any specifics of the new media venture but said details would be announced soon. Greenwald did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Two sources familiar with the new venture said the financial backer was Omidyar. It was not immediately clear if he was the only backer or if there were other partners.
Omidyar could not immediately be reached for comment.
Omidyar, who is chairman of the board at eBay Inc but is not involved in day-to-day operations at the company, has numerous philanthropic, business and political interests, mainly through an investment entity called the Omidyar Network.
Forbes pegged the 46-year-old Omidyar’s net worth at $8.5 billion.
Among his ventures is Honolulu Civil Beat, a news website covering public affairs in Hawaii. Civil Beat aimed to create a new online journalism model with paid subscriptions and respectful comment threads, though it is unclear how successful it has been.
Omidyar, a French-born Iranian-American, also founded the Democracy Fund to support “social entrepreneurs working to ensure that our political system is responsive to the public,” according to its website.
Omidyar’s active Twitter account suggests he is very concerned about the government spying programs exposed by Greenwald and Snowden.
The former NSA contractor was granted asylum in Russia on Aug. 1. He is living in a secret location beyond the reach of U.S. authorities who want him on espionage charges because he leaked the details of top-secret electronic spying programs to the media.
“There goes freedom of association: NSA collects millions of e-mail address books globally,” Omidyar tweeted on Tuesday, pointing to a new Washington Post story based on Snowden documents.
Jennifer Lindauer, a spokeswoman for the Guardian, said in a statement posted on Greenwald’s site: “We are of course disappointed by Glenn’s decision to move on, but can appreciate the attraction of the new role he has been offered. We wish him all the best.”
The news of Greenwald’s departure from the Guardian was reported earlier by Buzzfeed.