First Look Media laid off 20 employees on Wednesday, including five reporters from investigative news outlet The Intercept—one of whom played a pivotal role in reporting on multiple scandals involving the National Security Agency.
In an email sent to all staffers on Wednesday afternoon, obtained by The Daily Beast and first reported by Axios, First Look Media CEO Michael Bloom blamed the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic for forcing the company to “make some incredibly difficult decisions as we continue to maneuver through these unprecedented times.”
Adding that the nonprofit is now entering a “new phase,” Bloom wrote that in order “to ensure the long-term health of our organizations” First Look is “recalibrating our operations and unfortunately having to part ways with some of our beloved colleagues.”
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Founded in 2013 by eBay creator Pierre Omidyar, First Look Media houses not only The Intercept but also the Press Freedom Defense Fund, a nonprofit media support group, as well as documentary film studio Field of Vision, and for-profit content studio Topic Studio and streaming service Topic.
Bloom’s email and First Look’s rationale for the layoffs that also impacted The Intercept didn’t sit well with much of the staff, according to three sources familiar with the matter.
“While The Intercept is doing some of its best reporting since its inception, time and time again the parent company appears to be floundering in bad branding and ill-advised schemes to become profitable. If just months ago Topic was hitting ‘some key milestones,’ why was The Intercept put in the position to fire 5 staffers?” photo editor Elise Swain told The Daily Beast.
“Senior leadership was forced to make an impossible decision and we lost an excellent reporter in Alleen Brown as well as a dedicated video producer and more. Now, further staff positions aren’t able to be back-filled. Bloom’s email to the staff uses the pandemic—this act of god—as a scapegoat while the real blame lies with himself, an apparently failing subscription video on demand (SVOD) service, an expensive office, and the board's demand for skulls,” she added. “The email from Bloom verges on offensive: Don’t gaslight journalists.”
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While the email sent to First Look employees didn’t include the names of any of those impacted by the layoffs, one staffer took to social media to announce that she‘d been let go.
“Just got laid off from @theintercept,” reporter Alleen Brown tweeted on Wednesday. “I cover environmental justice, especially where it intersects with criminalization, incarceration, Indigenous affairs, labor, I could go on. DMs are open if you’re hiring.”
The Daily Beast has confirmed that along with Brown, other Intercept journalists that were let go include tech editor Ryan Tate, investigative researcher W. Paul Smith, documentary producer Paul Abowd, and investigative reporter Matthew Cole, the former NBC News reporter who in 2013 collaborated with Glenn Greenwald on reporting stories based on NSA subcontractor Edward Snowden’s leak of highly classified documents revealing U.S. global surveillance programs. Cole continued to work on such stories after The Intercept hired him in 2015.
The layoffs were spread out across both the nonprofit and for-profit portions of the organization, according to a source familiar with the situation.
Tate, for his part, spoke highly of The Intercept when reached for comment by The Daily Beast. “As someone who was there for seven plus years, since not long after the founding, I’ve seen The Intercept morph and evolve repeatedly like the media startup that it is, and given how much incredible talent they still retain, and the still substantial resources they possess, I genuinely believe they are on the verge of a bright and sustainable future,” he stated.
Aside from his work on the Snowden revelations, Cole was notably one of the journalists involved in The Intercept’s infamous NSA bombshell that unwittingly resulted in the arrest and conviction of whistleblower Reality Winner, who provided hacked documents to the outlet.
On Wednesday night, The Intercept’s union released a statement in response to the layoffs, saying they “did not need to occur.”
These appear to be the first company-wide layoffs since First Look shuttered access to Snowden’s tranche of leaked NSA documents and let go of several researchers who maintained those documents in 2019.
First Look did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
