9 months ago
Jimmy Finkelstein hastily built a rocket ship he named The Messenger, boarded a staff of 300 promising the moon, lit the fuse and then slunk away when it didn’t even reach orbit. The wreckage is considerable. Finkelstein and team, which had recruited experienced journalists from jobs at POLITICO, the New York Post, the Los Angeles Times, NBC News, Reuters and elsewhere, made no effort to rescue or aid the crew. No severance offered after their short-notice layoffs. No last rites. The only trace of the site that remains is a dead page reading “TheMessenger.” and an email address. Reporters learned they were being thrown into unemployment by reading the New York Times rather than a note from management.
Finkelstein is being drawn as a villain in the disaster. Former staffers have already shaken off the reentry dust and filed a class action suit against the busted publication for failing to provide notice of dismissal. Critics like S. Mitra Kalita of URL media have succinctly accused Finkelstein of erecting The Messenger on the “expertise of an internet that no longer exists,” as she told The New York Times, adding, “Facebook was not going to surface its links no matter how clickable those headlines were.”
Coming as it did with a recent wave of news business layoffs and cutbacks, the crash of The Messenger amplified the pessimism now sweeping through newsrooms. But it would be a mistake to blend The Messenger’s dark story into the ongoing drama without making a few amendments. The first would be that owing to self-interest, the news business over-reports layoffs and collapses in its own sector and underreports job losses elsewhere. On Thursday, The Washington Post and the rest of the press filed stories about the Wall Street Journal laying off 20 staffers in its D.C. bureau. We all sympathize, but would this have made the news if similarly sized businesses cut 20 people? Not all layoffs portend the end of the world. Sometimes layoffs arrive when a new editor — the Wall Street Journal just got one — makes decisions her predecessor wouldn’t. Nobody, not even experienced and talented journalists who have mortgages and medical bills, is owed a job.
The news business faces a dire future. But the industry contraction we’ve read so much about recently wasn’t a direct cause of The Messenger’s demise. And while Finkelstein's treatment of his employees may have been brutal at the end, he was arguably just as callous at the start by making promises he could never fulfill. The Messenger’s fall has so many causes beyond the one cited by Kalita that we need a more wide-ranging post-mortem if we hope to learn anything about it.
First and foremost, Finkelstein committed an act of business daredevilry when he entered a market already clogged with competitors — including but not limited to POLITICO, The Hill, Roll Call, Axios, Punchbowl News, Bloomberg News, the dailies, the networks, opinion magazines like The New Republic, newsletters and the various trade press outlets. Naysayers asserted that The Messenger couldn’t clear that logjam to be heard, but that view was common coin when The Hill challenged Roll Call, when POLITICO challenged the two of them, when POLITICO honchos broke away to form Axios, when POLITICO stalwarts launched Punchbowl News, and as former POLITICO owner Robert Allbritton has just started NOTUS. The Messenger’s death indicates that absent some editor inventing a major new wrinkle, Washington news has peaked. There are no discernable vacancies.
Finkelstein knew plenty about running a Washington publication, having helped found The Hill in 1994 and selling it in 2021 for $130 million. Why shouldn’t he be able to do it again? But being a daredevil this time around, Finkelstein made outrageous lunar promises at launch time. He promised to hire 550 journalists in the first year. He didn’t. The publication predicted it would make $50 million in revenue in its first year. It made only $3 million. And lost $38 million of its initial $50 million funding, according to the New York Times.
By nature, I’m not a grave dancer. Even the failure of bad publications — which The Messenger was not — saddens me. Because starting a new publication is more difficult than reaching the moon, I avoided criticizing The Messenger because I considered the first nine months of any publication the equivalent of an off-Broadway tryout: Parts are rewritten. Actors are dismissed and hired. Overtures are added. Costumes are redesigned. The Messenger showed all the signs of working out its kinks to become a solid publication. Valuable journalism resided there, even if, like many other publications, The Messenger often overhyped its findings. But now that it’s gone, it’s easy to agree that Finkelstein overpromised and underdelivered as wildly as a Silicon Valley startup that promises a world-changing gadget or piece of software but then delivers only vapor.
The most painful of the many lessons taught by The Messenger has got to be that the journalists it hired — cynical show-me types who see through the gas spouted by Washington politicians — didn’t sense the stench in Finkelstein’s. I would love to claim that nine months ago, I thought Finkelstein was full of it. But honestly, at the time, his emissions smelled like Chanel No. 5 to me.
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