Some of the new-media digirati have been having fun at the expense of First Look Media founder Pierre Omidyar, because the new company persists in describing its new family of media sites — including the just-launched Intercept from Glenn Greenwald — as “digital magazines.” Not only does the idea of a magazine seem almost antiquated by now, but most of the examples of the digital version are bloated proprietary apps from old-media standards like Vanity Fair and Time.

But while the magazine metaphor doesn’t quite work, there is something to the approach that First Look seems to be taking, although it’s difficult to tell for sure because the new company has only launched one. But my sense is that by “magazine,” they just mean a discrete publication focused on one single topic or issue, run by journalists who have some passion for the issue. And that’s not dumb at…