EBAY FOUNDER BIDDING ON TOP INVESTIGATIVE REPORTERS

Former Rolling Stone executive editor Eric Bates has been recruited by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald to become part of their $250-million NewCo media organization. While it is still unclear what the nature of NewCo will ultimately be — print, television, Internet or a combination of the three — it would appear from its first hires that it will focus on investigative journalism. Greenwald, the first to join, was the reporter who first leaked the Edward Snowden documents. He was joined by documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, who has also worked on the Snowden disclosures, and Jeremy Scahill, the former national security correspondent for The Nation. As an editor for nearly ten years at Rolling Stone, Bates also focused on national security features, including the late Michael Hastings’s profile of Gen. Stanley McChrystal that led to his ouster as U.S. commander in Afghanistan. In a statement, Omidyar said that Bates “will be instrumental in helping us define our editorial strategy for a general-interest audience as well as the editing infrastructure we will need to support our independent journalists.”