The new journalism outlet began less than a year ago to considerable fanfare. Claiming it would be unbiased and indispensable, the Messenger recruited hundreds of journalists, paid its executives lavishly and confidently forecast $100m in annual revenue this year.
It would be like the good old days when the media was beloved, its founder predicted.
“I remember an era where you’d sit by the TV, when I was a kid with my family, and we’d all watch ‘60 Minutes’ together,” the Messenger’s CEO, Jimmy Finkelstein, told the New York Times last year.
It sounded unlikely, at best, especially given its dubious business model – free, with revenue based on digital advertising.
This week, the whole thing came crashing down.
The all-digital outlet abruptly shut down its website and fired its staff without severance or extending healthcare benefits. Reports circulated quickly that staffers couldn’t even retrieve their belongings or even get access to the work they had done.
“On a human level, it was soul-crushing,” Messenger reporter Stephen Neukam, who covered Congress, told me by phone on Thursday. The 24-year-old was reporting on Capitol Hill when a Times story broke that the Messenger was toast. That story was immediately posted in the company’s internal messaging channel, and within minutes, an email came from Finkelstein that said he was terribly sorry but he couldn’t help it since the whole industry was tanking.
Neukam said he was proud of his Congress reporting and experienced no real editorial interference, but others described much of the Messenger’s fare as journalistic swill.
“This company worked its news and audience reporters to the bone,” tweeted Eli Walsh, who said he wrote an astonishing 630 stories over an eight-month period – and “most of them were just copying and pasting work” from other news organizations. Walsh said that because of this strategy, he doesn’t have a single story to market himself for his next job.
Finkelstein tried to blame his brainchild’s demise on the “headwinds” that all media organizations are experiencing these days. And it’s obvious that those forces are real. Ad revenue has cratered, traffic is down and sustainability looks like a mirage.
But the Messenger was actually not a typical but an exceptional case – exceptionally poor, that is, in both concept and execution.
“I was pissed the moment I heard about this dumb idea. It was business malpractice and human cruelty at an epic scale,” Jim VandeHei, the co-founder of both Politico and Axios, told Puck’s Dylan Byers.
It was a mess from the start.
Aram Zucker-Scharff, a data engineer and my former Washington Post colleague, put it this way: “Remember, they launched an ad-supported site intended to grab traffic from social and search without a working sitemap and incredibly broken ad tech.”
They also spent wildly, burning through investments of $50m in less than a year. The editor-in-chief reportedly was pulling down a mind-blowing $900,000 annually, yet by his own admission was out of the loop about what was coming down.
It’s infuriating to imagine the ways that the Messenger’s startup investment could have been spent.
“About 1,500 reporters”, estimated Steve Waldman, co-founder of Report for America, the national service program that puts journalists in local newsrooms, especially in regions at risk of becoming “news deserts”.
“You could fully fund a local newsroom,” wrote Gabe Schneider, noting that the accountability-focused outlet where he is editorial director, LA Public Press, could run on that amount for decades.
So yes, it’s a big waste, and the cost to individual lives and careers is high.
But what can we learn about the state of the news media today from this one case?
I see three takeaways.
First, facile ideas that sound too good to be true – especially in this gloomy media environment – probably are simply bad. Even some of the highest-quality news organizations are struggling to survive; many are finding it impossible. There’s no such thing as a quick fix.
Second, the notion of “centrism” – often a thinly disguised conservative slant – as a surefire way to attract a mass audience and vast revenue is a well-worn joke. Let us recall Chris Licht’s failed experiment at CNN to do something like that, which featured an apology tour of Republican election denialists. Another flameout.
And finally, I can understand why some job seekers grasped at the Messenger’s straws. It’s tough out there. But if you’re an employed journalist recruited by a rich guy with lofty notions about saving the industry, you should run. Fast.
Do it before he does.
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture
