Mentioned a while back that Pierre Omidyar, the founder of E-Bay, was starting a news organization from scratch. It will be designed for the digital era.
Well, it is up and running.
Check out The Intercept. It is the first ‘magazine’ of the First Look Media organization.
Based on my outsiders’ reading of the site, it looks like First Look will be launching multiple platforms, likely to be called magazines. Each individual journalist and small team of journalists will have a platform to write. There will presumably be many platforms for reporting.
First two feature articles were published on 2/10. Focus in the short-term for The Intercept will be on the NSA spying issues.
Frontier is open. For anyone who wants to go there.
The frontier of publishing is wide open. Very cool.
Exploring the publishing frontier on the scale of First Look Media requires some serious money. Mr. Omidyar is reportedly chipping in $250M for first round funding. Very few people can play at that level. Those few who want to, can do so.
It doesn’t take a ton of money.
The fantastic thing is that the technology to create a new journalism outlet is available to anyone. The tech is now at the level that anyone can explore the frontier. And you can do it for free. To look a little nicer takes under a hundred dollars a year. Another few hundred would make your site look really nice.
My point? Anyone can explore the boundaries of this frontier. You don’t need to have hundreds of millions of dollars sitting in the bank and a full-time staff. Even a CPA who is already working full-time, like yours truly, can have a journalism platform and voice.
And that is extremely cool.