The New Public-Interest Journalism

Lately, there’s been a lot of coverage of well-known journalists launching their own Web sites or going it alone with their existing ones: Glenn Greenwald, Nate Silver, Ezra Klein, and the All Things Digital crew come to mind. Now there’s an unlikely addition to the field: Bill Keller, the former executive editor and columnist of the Times. On Sunday, Keller announced he was leaving the paper to lead an online startup devoted to covering the criminal justice system.

The news about Keller came hours before Greenwald’s new site, The Intercept, went live. It launched with an exclusive and disturbing story about the N.S.A.’s role in selecting targets for drone attacks, which, it claimed, contributes to the killing of innocent civilians in places like Pakistan and Yemen. The story relied on an unnamed source who used to operate U.S. drones, and it also quoted from documents that Edward Snowden that discussed drone operations. (Greenwald and Laura Poitras, one of his colleagues at The Intercept, were two of the journalists who broke the Snowden story.)

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