Hawaii 5.0?: Pierre Omidyar's Island of New Journalism
It’s good to see some dot.com fortunes being plowed into experimental jouralism. After plowing $50 million into the Hawaii Community Foundation, the single largest gift by a living donor to that group, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar is moving toward a 2Q launch of his new Hawaii journalism site, Peer News. Given the eBay background, we’d expect it to embrace the social web as a starting point, and that’s where Omidyar and his new editor John Temple, late of the late Rocky, are headed. “Our goal is to create the new civic square,” he told Pacific Business News. It’s a for-profit model, a healthy alternative to the proliferation of non-profits. What should make the initiative watchable (and of course visitable by any number of new journalism watchers!) is that combo of deep pockets, deep community ties, social web knowledge and old-fashioned journalism smarts.