"Matt Taibbi Disappears From Omidyar’s First Look Media"

From New York Magazine:

Matt Taibbi, the star magazine writer hired earlier this year to start a satirical website for billionaire Pierre Omidyar's First Look Media, is on a leave of absence from the company after disagreements with higher-ups inside Omidyar's organization, a source close to First Look confirmed today.

Taibbi's abrupt disappearance from the company's Fifth Avenue headquarters has cast doubt on the fate of his highly anticipated digital publication, reportedly to be called Racket, which First Look executives had previously said would launch sometime this autumn.

When he was hired, amid much fanfare, Taibbi's website was meant to be the second in an envisioned fleet of titles to be published by First Look, an ambitious digital journalism company funded by Omidyar, the founder of eBay and one of the richest tech moguls in America. Like its counterpart the Intercept, launched earlier this year by Glenn Greenwald and others to pursue investigations of NSA surveillance and the intelligence world, it was a venture centered around a brand-name polemicist without much management experience. Prior to joining First Look, Taibbi made his name by gleefully skewering fat targets for Rolling Stone — most famously, he described Goldman Sachs as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity" — and he said at the time of his departure that he was lured away by the chance to lampoon the financial industry in the "simultaneously funny and satirical voice" associated with the legendary magazine Spy. Over the succeeding months, the mission of the publication broadened to encompass political satire as well, and it brought on a number of high-profile names from the New York digital scene, including deputy editor Alex Pareene, formerly of Salon; Laura Dawn, a digital video producer who formerly worked with Moveon.org; and Edith Zimmerman, founding editor of the Hairpin.

"Journalists should be dark, funny, mean people," Taibbi told New York in an interview in March. "It's appropriate for their antagonistic, adversarial role."...MORE