BackA Web guerrilla breaking news from the jungle
A look inside the mountain-top home office of the reporter who broke the Edward Snowden story
Premium
Rio De Janeiro: On approaching Glenn Greenwald’s home office high in the jungle-encrusted mountains above Rio de Janeiro, all is tranquil, bucolic even. A gurgling stream at the entrance frames the idyll.
And then the dogs notice the incursion. They bark, yap and yowl, and while it’s less Heart of Darkness than 101 Dalmatians, the sheer volume is mind-erasing.
Should we be surprised that the house of Greenwald, the legendarily combative privacy and national security reporter, is surrounded by loud, barking defenders—or that they are actually pussycats once you get to know them, as is their rescuer?
The visit to Greenwald’s jungle redoubt about 15 minutes from the beaches of Rio last week was notable for its contradictions. He is among the most wired journalists on earth, but he lives and works in Brazil, a country with a notoriously flaky Internet infrastructure.
He may have launched the lightning bolt of the Edward Snowden revelations from this house, but when it rains—which is often—the power fails.
On television and in print, he comes across as the ultimate alpha, ferocious and unbending, but here the dogs refuse to obey him, looking for guidance from his husband David instead. The guy who issues face-melting rebukes on cable and Twitter is also the softy who keeps a pack of hot dogs in his car’s glove box to throw to the dogs wandering the favelas.
Greenwald, 47, is a lawyer turned journalist—first blogging on his own, then for Salon, then The Guardian— turned Pulitzer Prize winner and author of multiple books. He is now in the midst of building First Look Media, a digital news site funded by Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay.
For all its challenges—the monkeys and dogs have daily throw-downs and some of the spiders are large and remarkably deadly—the location suits him, the eternal guerrilla fighting from the mountains. When cable television calls, he races down the hill to a satellite facility, suit coat and tie on top, sandals and shorts on the bottom.
On Tuesday morning last week, Greenwald was pleased. He woke up early and wrote an uncharacteristically brief post about the huge number of civilian casualties in the Gaza conflict. He was proud of the pie charts he had managed to conjure to go with his post.
“I went to Google and typed in ‘create a pie chart’ and I ended up with an online pie-chart maker probably intended for first-graders," he said. I mentioned that he now works for a digital news site that has a $250 million endowment from Omidyar and some very talented data journalists and graphic artists.
“Yeah, I know, but I would have had to wait and I didn’t want to wait," he said. “There are others things, like the 7,000-word story we just did on the surveillance of Muslim Americans that 15 people probably worked on—the video, graphic and editing resources make a huge difference. But I wanted this to be simple and I wanted it to be mine."
True to his intent, Greenwald’s first-grade pie charts entered the bloodstream of the Web, coursing around Twitter and various blogs. Nothing— other than yet another dog rescue—pleases Greenwald more than lobbing in something from a great distance and watching it detonate. He was doing that long before he ever wrote for The Intercept, the name of the site that he works with at First Look.
The day before, Omidyar had written that First Look, which initially said it would build a large, general interest site featuring a number of digital magazines, would instead concentrate on the two sites it has already started: The Intercept, which includes Greenwald, documentarian Laura Poitras, and journalist Jeremy Scahill along with others; and a yet-to-be-named project led by former Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi.
The readjustment is a recognition that Web journalism that gains traction usually emanates from lone voices with a strong point of view. It’s a reset, but from Greenwald’s perspective, the Internet is defined by reiteration and experimentation.
“I don’t think there is going to be one model," he said.
As he spoke, his hands wandered between hitting refresh on his laptop to see updates on how his post was performing to dealing out random scratches for the dogs that wheeled by.
“That’s why we’ve stopped and started and stopped and started," he said. “Figuring out a model is really hard because we don’t want to be just a dependency of Pierre. We could, he has so much money, but I think he wants to create a new model of journalism, and that only works if it becomes in some way self-sustaining."
In his view, oxygen and audience will find those that it should.
“No one, not The New York Times, no one, is entitled to an audience," he said, looking across the table and smiling. “The ability to thrive is directly dependent upon your ability to convince people that you’re providing something valuable and unique."
He praised Omidyar, who he says is just trying to level the field with legacy media.
“There’s a lot of distrust of billionaires and the oligarchic model," he said. “People don’t believe that you’re really going to get to be journalistically independent. But you can’t complain that there’s not serious investigative journalism against big corporate and governmental outlets and then at the same time oppose every single model that lets you have the kind of funding that you need."
As a personal matter, his new approach is not that much different than the way it has always been.
“I began by writing 4,000-word posts about very arcane, complicated issues at a time when you were supposed to post two paragraphs," he said. “That was supposed to drive everybody away, but my audience just kept growing and growing. It worked because there was a passion and a conviction to it that is often missing in mainstream coverage."
Which is to say that Greenwald likes being part of building something larger with more resources - as long as he is free to wake up and use the digital equivalent of a pair of sticks and a rock to get his point out there, right away. Regardless of how it’s published, he loves pushing the button on a post that is going to push people’s buttons.
“It’s funny," he said. “I’m working with a Silicon Valley technologist who became the 100th richest person in the world through his understanding of programming, but half the time we can’t communicate on the telephone because my Internet isn’t working or my phone is out. It’s an irony, but it’s also a kind of balance for me."
That balance includes more than a dozen dogs—Sheila, Sylvestre, Mabel, I lost track of the names. I pointed out that he is nearing cat-lady status, engulfed by his need to rescue. No, he said, “we have a limit, so I am not like a cat lady."
The limit, he said, is 12.
I counted 13 dogs.
“One of them is a guest dog and will be leaving soon."
Yeah, sure.
William Blake suggested that the road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom, so maybe Greenwald is on to something. It is a measure of the oddities of the current media age that part of the road to the future includes many switchbacks up this mountainside and the dogs that bark endlessly and ferociously, deep into the night.
©2014/The New York Times
Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed – it's all here, just a click away! Login Now!
