EBAY FOUNDER PLANNING TO REIGNITE NEWS MEDIA

EBay founder Pierre Omidyar has acknowledged that he began thinking about creating a new news organization after discussing a possible purchase of the Washington Post with its former owners. Although the Post was finally sold to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the talks “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 said on his website on Wednesday. The project was first revealed on Tuesday when it was reported that Glenn Greenwald, who first reported on the Edward Snowden NSA documents, would be leaving the Guardian newspaper to join Omidyar’s media project. Omidyar provided few details about that project in his post on Tuesday, writing only, “Right now, I’m in the very early stages of creating a new mass media organization. I don’t yet know how or when it will be rolled out, or what it will look like.” He did confirm that Greenwald will be joined by documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras and The Nation’s investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill in launching the project. And in an interview with journalist Jay Rosen’s PressThink.org, he said that he expects to fund the new venture with at least the $250 million that he was considering offering for the Washington Post.