‘The Messenger’ Promised To Revolutionize Journalism, Then Fell Flat On Its Face

Failures

from the who-could-have-possibly-seen-it-coming dept

Early last year new journalism outlet named “The Messenger” launched to great fanfare.

The brainchild of former The Hill owner Jimmy Finkelstein, the new news empire launched with $50 million in backing and a lot of chatter about how it was going to revolutionize U.S. journalism. Finkelstein claimed he wanted to build “an alternative to a national news media” that “has come under the sway of partisan influences,” insisting there was an easy path toward becoming one of the biggest news outlets online with over 100 million readers monthly.

Yeah, about that.

Fast forward to 2024 and The Messenger currently ranks somewhere around #195 among all U.S. news sites, roughly on par with some local Texas broadcast news stations. But there are also reports that the outlet is facing “dire financial straits” after failing to achieve any of its promised metrics.

The company only saw $3 million in revenue compared to $38 million in losses. It now only has around $1.8 million on hand, and things are looking decidedly shaky. First to go, as always, are the employees that had nothing to do with the company’s actual strategic failures:

“This week the company is laying off roughly two dozen employees, including those who covered national politics, science and technology. It is raising money from investors to maintain its operations through this year. On Tuesday, Richard Beckman, a founder who was a long-serving executive at the magazine company Condé Nast, announced he was leaving the company.”

There were several prominent journalists drawn to the promise of a news outlet that did things differently. One problem: the outlet didn’t actually do anything differently. It wasn’t long after launch that employees began to complain that site leaders were prioritizing mindless aggregated clickbait over real reporting or meaningful, original analysis.

Much like Politico, Semafor, Axios, and other prominent modern journalism outlets of the day, The Messenger’s coverage also generally suffers from what NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen calls the “view from nowhere,” or a sort of timid, pseudo-objectivity that fails to prioritize the sole function of journalism: getting to the truth.

Such journalism is a direct reflection of millionaire or billionaire media owners who don’t want to offend sources, advertisers, or event sponsors with bold, truth-telling journalism that has actual teeth. So what you get instead is a sort of journalism simulacrum that often fails to critique wealth, corruption, or power with any real consistency, since the wealthy and powerful owners very obviously don’t want that.

The idea that the affluent out of touch gentleman behind The Hill — itself a longstanding purveyor of clickbait and timid “both sides” journalism — was going to single-handedly change modern reporting was always laughable. Especially given that Finkelstein had made it abundantly clear hadn’t learned much from the last decade of Trumpism.

Like so many rich media executives (see: Politico owner and CEO Mathias Döpfner), Finkelstein was seemingly incapable of seeing most of the fatal flaws in modern U.S. journalism, because at best they don’t impact him personally and at worst he actively benefits from them.

He can’t see the inherent class, race and gender biases in most newsrooms, the steady erosion of trust caused by feckless “both sides” reporting, or the underlying flaws with the engagement-baiting advertising models that can violently derail efforts to genuinely inform the public.

He’s not alone; recall when Semafor decided to launch a “trust in news” symposium by hosting right wing propagandist Tucker Carlson, then bristled at the idea this wasn’t helping? As the NYT op-ed section ably demonstrates on a daily basis, a growing number out outlets are primarily interested in culture war trolling disguised as intellectualism. Engagement is king. Risk-taking journalism is an afterthought.

News outlets owned by trust fund brunchlords aren’t generally interested the truth. They’re interested in insider gossip and controversy and slurping up the ad engagement that results. That, very obviously, has made them violently susceptible to a surging authoritarian movement that makes its bread and butter through propaganda, engagement trolling, and outrage amplification.

Journalism at its best should easily puncture these illusions, but time and time again (as we just saw with the NYT’s participation in the right wing propagandist’s bad-faith assault on academic institutions over trumped-up plagiarism accusations), these kinds of dominant media outlets actively participate in the charade. They can’t see or report on the field accurately (or refuse to), and the public has noticed.

But such executives are also just inherently terrible at their jobs, hoovering up outsized executive compensation while competent reporters and editors are laid off in droves. The collective result has been a steadily eroding public trust in journalism, while the best in the industry are relegated to the fringes and the worst in the industry fail-ever upward into greater positions of prominence.

We need a revolution when it comes to the creative funding of independent journalism. But such efforts have been hard to come by in a country that often prioritizes get-quick scams over substance and real reform. One potential option is greater public funding of journalism; a concept that often works well overseas (when properly firewalled from government meddling) but has become a non-starter in the U.S. after years of demonization by the U.S. right wing.

One excellent trend has been a shift away from an almost-mindless obsession with scale back toward smaller media outlets owned and operated by the actual people making the news.

Newsletters (unfortunately including the ones operated by engagement-seeking Nazi normalizers) continue to thrive, and we’ve seen numerous writers and editors tired of managerial incompetence build their own ventures (see: the Vice Motherboard folks fleeing the idiotic Vice bankruptcy to create 404 Media).

But by and large real journalism, especially of the integrity-oriented, independent variety, remains on life support, and the folks in real positions of influence see little financial incentive to engage in meaningful introspection anytime soon. As a result, real U.S. journalism is being supplanted by feckless journalistic simulacrum, engagement trolling, and rank, well-funded authoritarian propaganda.

What could possibly go wrong?

Filed Under: axios, both sides, jimmy finkelstein, journalism, layoffs, mathias dopfner, reporting, semafor, the hill, the messenger, view from nowhere
Companies: the messenger