They say donât shoot the messenger, but what if The Messenger shoots itself?
Media startup The Messenger burst on the scene last May with $50 million dollars in hand, aggressively hiring journalists to build an âunbiasedâ digital newsroom. Instead, its staff found out through a New York Times article today that the publication is shutting down. According to employeesâ social media posts, the laid off workers will not receive any severance, and their healthcare coverage will end.
âThe last thing I saw in The Messengerâs slack was a panicked colleague writing âwait, what about our insurance coverage, I have a surgery booââ and then we all got booted out!!!â said journalist Jordan Hoffman in a post on X.
The journalism industry hasnât had a great year, in part due to declining digital ad sales across the board. But The Messengerâs implosion is shockingly egregious, even in a time when 3,000 journalists have been laid off in the last year.
Founded by Jimmy Finkelstein (the former owner of The Hollywood Reporter and The Hill), The Messenger had lost about $38 million of its startup capital and only generated $3 million by late last year, per the New York Times. At launch, Finkelstein claimed the company would grow to make $100 million in revenue after its first year, but it only lasted about nine months.
The Messenger had been trying to raise additional capital in the hours leading up to its demise. But it failed to secure the funding it needed, which raises the question of why the publication needed to raise more money so soon, anyway.
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âOver the last few weeks, literally until last night, we exhausted every option available and have endeavored to raise sufficient capital to reach profitability,â Finkelstein wrote. âUnfortunately, we have been unable to do so, which is why we havenât shared the news with you until now. This is truly the last thing I wanted, and I am deeply sorry.â
Like pretty much every other company that has conducted layoffs in the last few years, Finkelstein cited vague âeconomic headwindsâ in his note to staff about the closure (which, we cannot emphasize enough, came after staff learned that they lost their jobs from a New York Times article). Still, Finkelstein has not addressed just how itâs possible to burn through so much money so quickly.
From the get-go, media experts were skeptical of The Messengerâs game plan, which was to leverage social media referral traffic to generate ad revenue. This strategy for a media business might have worked fifteen years ago, but this isnât the era of the BuzzFeed boom (just look at that companyâs stock price). At launch, Nieman Lab noted that The Messenger was publishing a new story every two minutes, some of which were only one sentence long. Though Finkelsteinâs ambitions to build a large-scale, unbiased media machine were lofty, they were ultimately doomed to fail. Sadly, that failure means financial uncertainty and precarious healthcare coverage for its workers.
âI cannot fathom doing this to anyone,â wrote former Messenger staffer Madeline Fitzgerald on X. âI donât [know] why you would treat employees like this.â