In perhaps the least surprising news in media, The Messenger has shut down. The site was designed to be a straight, generalist news site built on big traffic and advertising. It didn’t work, and where all those articles and adverts once sat there is now only a holding page.
A small or specialist publication might have had a shot, but The Messenger was dreaming big. As Benjamin Mullin at the New York Times noted:
[Founder Jimmy] Finkelstein spoke grandly of its editorial ambitions, telling The New York Times in March that he wanted the website to recall great journalism institutions like “60 Minutes” and Vanity Fair. He critiqued the coverage on channels like CNN and Fox News, noting what he said were inconsistencies in coverage of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. capitol and the southern border.
Finkelstein and co. had big ambitions but were relying on an outdated business model to achieve them. And The Messenger didn’t have the financial backing that would have given it a chance to play the long game to hit these goals. It couldn’t focus on scoops and original angles and ended up largely churning out rewrites in a desperate bid for traffic.
A war chest of $50 million might seem like a large amount of money, but the idea you can take on the likes of the New York Times from scratch with that kind of budget is for the birds. As Nicholas Carlson, Editor-in-chief of Business Insider, explained on Threads:
As big as those numbers sound, they are tiny compared to its established competitors. The NYT co spent $2bn to operate in 2022, employing 5,800 people — 2,600 of them in its journalism operation.
This is not because having a popular website with adverts is a bad idea in and of itself. HuffPost, for example, is still going and competes well enough in terms of stories and SEO. There are plenty of tech news sites that do great work too. They are all established brands though. The Messenger was not. Given we’re in an age in which even lots of established brands, including those owned by space-travelling gazillionaires, are struggling to keep the lights on, the likelihood of a newcomer coming to play on their turf and winning was always next to nil.
Compare and contrast all this with what Semafor is trying to build, for instance. Or Puck.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Addition to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.