A good way to establish the credibility of an online news startup is to hire somebody with a solid journalism reputation–somebody like Bill Keller, a former executive editor of The New York Times who now holds the prestigious post of Op-Ed columnist. But Keller, perched in his chair in the Times tower, would never do it, right?
Wrong. Keller has just signed on as the first editor-in-chief at the Marshall Project, a news startup devoted to coverage of the U.S. criminal justice system.
The Marshall Project, which plans to launch in the middle of this year, was established by Neil Barsky, a former reporter for the New York Daily News and The Wall Street Journal and co-founder of the hedge fund Midtown Capital, according to his Marshall Project bio.
The hiring of Keller gives the site instant visibility and credibility. It's the same strategy the widely respected investigative news site ProPublica used when it hired former Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger as its founding editor-in-chief.
While it's easy to understand why Barsky would want Keller, why would Keller want Barsky? NPR's Renee Montagne asked him that question this morning. "It appealed on a number of levels. One of them was just the subject is so rich, criminal justice, and it’s such a scandal how bad our criminal justice system is. We incarcerate more people than any other country on Earth. And it’s a window on race, it’s a window on how we treat the mentally ill."
Keller admitted to being on a bit of a mission, adding that "if we can make people pay a little more attention to it, then I would be very proud of that."
Justin Ellis at the Nieman Journalism Lab wondered about the Marshall Project's decision to focus on a single topic. "Is this a single topic ProPublica?" he asks. "An InsideClimateNews for courts and prisons?"
The Marshall Project isn't the only online site to make news this week. Glen Greenwald, the former reporter at The Guardian who was a key figure in reporting on the National Security Agency documents released by Edward Snowden, launched his highly anticipated news site in collaboration with Pierre Omidyar, a former cofounder of eBay. It, too, will focus on a single topic, at least at the start–the NSA story.
The site is called The Intercept, and it's part of First Look Media, Omidyar's news startup. The Intercept could be the first of a number of publications exploring important stories. "Our long-term mission is to produce fearless, adversarial journalism across a wide range of issues," its founders write. It seems reasonable to suggest that reporting on medicine, health care, science, and technology should be among the subjects that First Look addresses.
In a blog post last October, Omidyar made it sound like almost anything is possible:
What I can tell you is that the endeavor will be independent of my other organizations, and that it will cover general interest news, with a core mission around supporting and empowering independent journalists across many sectors and beats. The team will build a media platform that elevates and supports these journalists and allows them to pursue the truth in their fields. This doesn’t just mean investigative reporting, but all news.
As Keller told Ellis, expecting too much from sites such as these would once have seemed "bizarre and speculative." Now, he said, "I guess it is a little speculative, but it's no longer bizarre. It's the new normal."
-Paul Raeburn
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