Greenwald: Matt Taibbi Was Investigated for "Verbally Abusive and Unprofessionally Hostile" Conduct Toward a Female Staffer

It took awhile, but First Look founder Pierre Omidyar probably has the first article on First Look that will go super viral.

Unfortunately the article is about the hijinks surrounding Omidyar's internet news start-up, which has now resulted in Matt Taibb leaving the organization. Glenn Greenwaold, Laura Poitras, Jeremy Schal and John Cook have co-authored the inside look.

Here are a snippets:

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.

The departure of the popular former Rolling Stone writer is a serious setback for First Look in its first year of operations.
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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.
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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.


That letter led to lengthy and often heated discussions. But they were productive: Most of The Intercept’s problems were eventually resolved. 
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For a time, it appeared that Taibbi’s project had also found the right path. It, too, received its own multi-million-dollar budget, began to hire more reporters, filmmakers, and editors, and set a launch date for September.

But because the site had not yet launched, First Look continued to focus on organizational and corporate issues, and managers actively supervised and at times overruled Taibbi’s management decisions. His relationships with both First Look managers and some Racket employees who reported to him were strained.

Taibbi and First Look disagreed over the functionality of the website, the timing of its launch, which designers and programmers they would use, Racket‘s organizational chart—even, at one point, over office seating assignments.


These simmering problems came to a head this month when a Racket staffer complained to senior management that Taibbi had been verbally abusive and unprofessionally hostile, and that she felt the conduct may have been motivated, at least in part, by her gender. Temple conducted an investigation, and First Look determined that while none of the alleged conduct rose to the level of legal liability, the grievance bolstered their case that Taibbi should not be the manager of Racket. 

THE FULL ARTICLE IS HERE

Final note: Grenwald et al. conclude:

 The fate of the remaining Racket staff remains uncertain. Taibbi’s departure means that First Look has lost a talented, unique, and influential journalistic voice before he published a single word. After months of struggle and negotiation, The Intercept has arrived at the point where it can function effectively: with full editorial freedom and an ample budget. But First Look and Taibbi failed to reach a similar mutual understanding. Those two radically different outcomes underscore the ongoing difficulty of finding the ideal model for well-funded independent journalism.

I don't see this as only a type of "model" problem but more a managerial problem, It's a further example of  the very loose money in Silicon Valley(SEE: How To Get Funded with Dumb Venture Capital Money) , often in the hands of very wealthy individuals, who have limited managerial and investing experience. Omidyar is the founder of eBay and became a billionaire at the age of 31.

When it is your money, you set the rules and others have to decide if they want to work under those rules. Clearly, Omidyar didn't set clear rules, which led to problems. Further, it is absolutely insane to think that someone who is a wannabe gonzo-style journalist will necessarily no how to manage a magazine, internet or otherwise. It is clear that Omidyar is learning these basics on the fly.

But my suspicions are that the problems go way beyond these basics. The vision of Omidyar's web site has always seemed cloudy to me, his marketing is terrible and if he didn't have Greenwald, the web site would be totally sunk by now.

Hey, maybe he should take my upcoming course: How to Become a Professional Libertarian Blogger and Make Between $30,000 and $250,000 a Year. It's not specifically aimed at non-libertarian billionaires who want to be the William Randolph Hearst of the internet age, but the basics in the course will certainly advance his knowledge beyond what it appears to be now.

-RW