‘The Messenger’ Implosion Once Again Shows The Real Problem With U.S. Journalism Is Shitty Management By Visionless, Fail-Upward Brunchlords

Journalism

from the maybe-incompetent-rich-people-are-the-problem dept

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

The brainchild of former The Hill owner Jimmy Finkelstein, the outlet 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 and $100 million in 2024 revenues.

The news outlet didn’t even last a year.

After several weeks of reports that the outlet was running out of cash, this week The Messenger announced it would be shutting down entirely. In an email to staff, Finkelstein blamed “economic headwinds” on the news outlet’s collapse:

“The industry has faced extraordinary challenges this past year. The economic headwinds have left many media companies fighting for survival. Unfortunately, as a new company, we encountered even more significant challenges than others and could not survive those headwinds. I am grateful to you and the partners who believed in our mission and came on board over the past seven months, but the reality is that we needed more capital to move forward successfully.“

There’s zero admission of any strategic missteps in the statement. No ownership of mismanagement. All of the problems were apparently caused by ambiguous externalities. Now, all that’s left of the website and a year of work is a blank page.

As is par for the course for U.S. journalism, those who will be hit hardest by managerial incompetence are the actual writers and editors, who had to learn about the company’s shutdown from other news outlets. Several Messenger reporters took to social media to document the carnage, noting they were kicked off of internal slack comms before anybody in management could be bothered to tell them the news:

Managers couldn’t even be bothered to communicate severance, health insurance, or other essential employment particulars before the site and all comms went dead:

It’s certainly true that it’s difficult to make money off of journalism given the rise of social media, slowdowns in the news ad market, and other factors (the stuff outlets like Axios or Politico like to focus on exclusively). Less discussed by major outlets is that the folks leading these companies genuinely don’t know what they’re doing or understand the modern media environment they operate in.

Much like Politico, Semafor, Axios, the New York Times and other prominent modern journalism outlets of the day, The Messenger’s coverage generally suffered 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 actual truth.

Many Messenger reporters who thought they were being hired to do real reporting had complained for much of the last year about how they were being forced to suddenly chase ad impressions by crafting low-quality aggregated engagement bait more akin to infotainment than journalism.

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 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 he didn’t learn much from the last decade of Trumpism, or understand how authoritarians exploit the kind of pseudo-objective, “both sides” journalism he remains fascinated by.

Such executives and owners are very obviously terrible at their jobs, hoovering up outsized executive compensation while competent reporters and editors are laid off in historic droves. The collective result has been a steady erosion of public trust in journalism. The best in the industry get relegated to the fringes, while the worst in the industry fail ever upward into greater positions of prominence.

All while a rotating crop of billionaires, hedge fund bros, and unremarkable trust fund brats play games of pointless patty cake with unnecessary mergers, automated trash, and the corpses of dying brands.

If you’ve spent any time in journalism, it’s completely wild to think about what a small team of smart, hungry journalists and editors could do with $50 million. It’s enough to staff a team of hard-nosed ProPublica-esque journalists for the better part of the next decade.

Instead, $50 million was set on fire in a purposeless quest for bland infotainment at scale by men who don’t know what they’re doing, don’t understand the industry they work in, and have no foundational idea how the information environment has shifted in the last two decades.

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, the underlying flaws with the engagement-baiting advertising models that can violently derail efforts to genuinely inform the public, or the way well-funded authoritarian propagandists exploit these failures for messaging and recruitment traction.

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 of outlets are primarily interested in culture war engagement bait disguised as intellectualism. Mindless engagement is king.

This kind of scale-chasing incompetence by visionless brunchlords is why we’ve seen such a massive push toward independent newsletters, or smaller, journalist-owned media outfits (see: 404 Media’s creation by the Motherboard team fleeing the Vice bankruptcy). Outlets that aren’t mindlessly obsessed with infotainment at scale, cultivating a loyal local audience and trust one day at a time by telling the truth.

Journalism is still obviously hard to fund and sustain. There’s no limit of financing challenges. But we’ve been so distracted by shitty AI or get-rich NFT schemes, we’ve only really just started to have real conversations about creative funding options, or how to isolate independent journalism from capitalism’s baser instincts (Professor Victor Pickard has a good recent read on this).

It’s a radical idea, but we could make meaningful progress if we clawed journalism from the hands of affluent, out of touch brunchlords, and put it back under the control of diverse, hungry journalists and editors who actually understand the news industry and media environment they work and exist in.

Filed Under: brunchlords, disinformation, jimmy finkelstein, journalism, media layoffs, propaganda, reporting
Companies: the messenger