Deep pockets lure high-profile journalists from traditional media outlets.

Jarvis, John

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Major League Baseball fans know that team owners with the deepest pockets can afford to hire the best talent available for their clubs, no matter their previous affiliations. It now seems the media world is taking a lesson from the sports arena, as some big-name writers and editors have switched allegiances to work for newly minted moguls vowing to remake the media landscape.

Consider the following journalism "free agents" who changed teams recently:

* Glenn Greenwald, who built his bona fides at the Guardian newspaper by breaking the news about the National Security Agency's electronic surveillance efforts (with the help of information provided by Edward Snowden), has joined a new journalist venture, a "digital magazine" called the Intercept, which is bankrolled by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Intercept is designed as a nonprofit entity, with both a charitable and commercial aspect to its operations. Omidyar said last fall that he aimed to put up $250 million to the Intercepts parent company, First Look Media, which will encompass other digital magazines and media products. (Omidyars wealth has been estimated by Forbes magazine to be close to $8.5 billion.) Greenwald's co-editor at Intercept is Laura Poitras, a documentary film maker who helped him obtain the Snowden leaks. Intercept also has attracted another big-name journalist to its fold: Matt Taibbi, who built his reputation reporting on the recent financial crisis as a Rolling Stone contributing editor. Intercept also boasts such media luminaries as Dan Froomkin, who has written for the Washington Post and the Huffington Post; Peter Maass, whose stories have been printed in the New Yorker and the Times Magazine; and Jeremy Scahill, who penned a book titled "Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield."

* Bill Keller, the former editor of the New York Times, has a new gig with the Marshall Project, a nonprofit investigative news site. Neil Barsky, a former reporter at the Wall Street Journal who made his fortune as a hedge-fund manager, is the initial financial backer for Kellers new gig. Keller's staff will grow to about 30 when all is said and done, according to media reports. The Marshall Project's website notes that the United States "has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. From spiraling costs, to controversial drug laws, to prison violence, to concerns about system racial bias, there is a growing bipartisan consensus that America's criminal-justice system is in dire need of reform. As traditional media companies cut back on enterprise reporting, the Marshall Project will serve as a dynamic hub for information and debate on the legal and corrections systems."

* Ezra Klein, the creator of the Wonkblog at the Washington Post, announced earlier this year that he would be leaving the Post to join a digital start-up, Vox Media, which is the home to the sports website SB Nation and the technology website the Verge. Klein will be joined at Vox by Melissa Bell and Dylan Matthews, who were his colleagues at the Post, as well as Matthew Yglesias of Slate, whose stories have appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Washington Monthly and other publications. Klein described the reason behind his decision to leave the Post this way: "New information is not always--and perhaps not even usually--the most important information for understanding a topic. The overriding focus on the new made sense when the dominant technology was newsprint: limited space forces hard choices. You can't print a newspaper telling readers everything they need to know about the world, day after day. But you can print a newspaper telling them what they need to know about what happened on Monday. The constraint of newness was crucial." He added that "the Web has no such limits. There's space to tell people both what happened today and what happened that led to today."

* Nate Silver, who built his reputation with his FiveThirtyEight political blog at the New York Times, launched his joint enterprise with ESPN, www.FiveThirtyEight.com, on March 17. Notable hires to accompany Silver in this endeavor include lead writer Mona Chalabi (formerly of the Guardian), features editor Lisa Chow (formerly of National Public Radio) and senior editor Micah Cohen (formerly of the New York Times). Initial reactions to Silver's new website were tepid; the New York Times' Paul Krugman, in his "The Conscience of a Liberal" blog, wrote March 18 about FiveThirtyEight's first stories thusly: "You use data to inform your analysis, you let it tell you that your pet hypothesis is wrong, but data are never a substitute for hard thinking.... Tell me something meaningful! Tell me why the data matter!"

What makes all these "free agent" moves so newsworthy is that it's the Major League Baseball equivalent of a star player at the peak of his career leaving the New York Yankees--with the fame, fortune and attending media market that goes with the job--and agreeing to relocate to Podunkville, USA, to play for a no-name team in the middle of nowhere. Journalists of all stripes dream of someday making it to the elite media organizations that these reporters and editors are abandoning, which makes these moves all the more perplexing.

When any new lineup takes shape, whether in sports or in news, a little bit of uncertainty greets the announcement. For these media moves, that uncertainty centers on what it means for a journalist to be "objective." That debate, in turn, begs the question: Is it more important for a journalist to hide the bias in the stories he or she writes, or is it better to admit the bias up front?

It also remains to be seen whether these changes will result in more revenue streams in what lately has been a money-losing industry. But in a February blog post in the New Yorker, John Cassidy wrote that "despite their differing origins and sources of funding, however, the Marshall Project and First Look Media share one thing in common: a commitment to high-quality, independent journalism, which tackles serious subjects and, when necessary, upsets powerful interests."

A story written by Ben Cardew and posted to the Guardian's website March 2 quoted news industry analyst Ken Doctor as saying of the idea behind the philanthropic model of journalism: "We've seen foundations and individuals bankroll, for start-up and beyond, sites from ProPublica to the Center for Investigative Reporting to MinnPost to Texas Tribune. Nonprofit philanthropically funded journalism has gotten new life in the digital world. It will work as long as the money flows."

Cardew, whose story is titled "Can Greenwald's digital magazine Intercept help to reinvent journalism?" reported that Greenwald sees this financial independence as key to helping the Intercept and other First Look journalism endeavors succeed.

"A lot of news organizations are desperate to avoid litigation with governments and big corporations, because it is expensive to do that," Greenwald said. "Or they are afraid to publish aggressively about huge corporations for the fear of getting sued. Part of the idea of having a really well-funded news organization is (being) someone who has the resources to defend these principles."

These changes hold the promise to shake the established narrative of media being a money-losing venture--and, at the same time, remind all of us that what is happening is nothing new. Paul Waldman, a contributing editor for the American Prospect, penned an article titled "Glorious, Ghasdy News" that was posted to the Prospect's website March 4. In it, Waldman refers to "a major study of the way information sources affect people's views" with regard to politics, and he detailed how the "researchers found that voters gravitated to media they knew wouldn't challenge their opinion." The twist in this tale is that Waldman revealed that "this study, by Paul Lazarsfeld and his colleagues at Columbia University, was conducted nearly three-quarters of a century ago," before the 1940 presidential contest between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his challenger, Wendell Willkie.

Waldman's point is that the media landscape has always been in a state of change. What is different now, he wrote, is that we are moving away from "mass" media, where fewer choices meant more homogeneity in viewership, to "niche" media fueled by the Internet, where we can pick and choose what information (and from whom) to consume in a kind of "information snowflake" that is as unique as we are.

So if these journalism "free agents" do manage to serve the public good while also managing to reinvent how we deliver the news, then so much the better.