The Intercept calls this “The Inside Story Of Matt Taibbi’s Departure From First Look Media,” and it can rightly be called an exercise in public laundering more to the embarrassment of Pierre Omidyar than anyone else. Still, the real inside story would have to come from Taibbi himself and it’s hard not to wonder whether Greenwald et al were wanting to preempt that story.

And even if Omidyar can justifiably be criticized for micro-managing the operation he’s funding, those who thought he was going to be their media mogul sugar daddy seem to have had the attitude that the combination of his money and their creative genius was all it would take to create a new media business.

The conundrum they face might be this: is it possible to build an organization around individuals who don’t want to be part of an organization?

To view things like “which computer program to use to internally communicate, [and] mandatory regular company-wide meetings” as “trivial” is to confuse the trivial with the mundane. The mundane is often boring but that doesn’t make it unimportant or unnecessary.