‘The Messenger’ Speed Runs The U.S. Journalism Implosion Cycle Thanks To Incompetent Billionaires And ‘Both Sides’ Clickbait Gibberish
Earlier this year a 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 do things differently, with Finkelstein claiming he wanted to build an alternative to a national news media" that has come under the sway of partisan influences." Finkelstein insisted there was a clear and simple path to having over 100 million readers monthly, which would have made it one of the biggest news sites online.
Right out of the gate there were signs of trouble. SEO bumbling resulted in a website that barely registered with search engines. And this new, supposedly different" media operation immediately doubled down on the kind of aggregated clickbait journalism even though it was supposed to be above such engagement bait. All while its projected growth and revenue figures were derided as fantasy.
After months of grumbling by reporters and other employees, news has now emerged that the company is warning of impending financial collapse. At the same time, employees eye unionization as the outlet begins exploring using the kind of half-baked AI" that's been a clumsy disaster for outlets like CNET:
Meanwhile, with reporters already grousing about the reliance on clickbait" journalism and aggregation to generate gobs of content, the newsroom was taken aback this month by the announcement that the site was partnering with Seekr, an AI company.
The Messenger currently ranks somewhere around #195 among U.S. news sites, roughly on par with some local Texas broadcast news stations.
The idea that the rich and out of touch gentleman behind The Hill - itself a longstanding purveyor of clickbait and timid journalism - was going to single-handedly change modern reporting was laughable. Especially given that this is a guy who seemingly didn't learn much from the last decade of Trumpism.
Like so many rich media executives (see: Politico owner and CEO Mathias Dopfner), Finkelstein's incapable of seeing most of the fatal flaws in modern U.S. journalism, whether it's the inherent class, race and gender biases in most newsrooms, the steady erosion of trust caused by feckless both sides" or view from nowhere" reporting, or the underlying flaws with the ad-engagement models that now prop up - and violently derail - efforts to educate and inform the public.
Even then, the speed of The Messenger's collapse has been fairly remarkable. Lauren Theisen at Disruptor puts it well:
The lesson of The Messenger, to me, is not the portentous signs surrounding its start, but the infuriating ways in which money congeals at the top of the media pyramid. That $50 million invested in The Messenger before it even launched could have been used to pay up front for over a decade of work from a modestly budgeted but still innovative and effective newsroom. Why do we instead have a media environment where a 74-year-old can take all that money for a blatantly unprofitable click farm dressed up in network-era drag? Who bought into this scheme, and how can we ensure that they never have any power to affect real people's livelihoods again?
That $50 million could have gone a long, long way at any number of upstart outlets doing disruptive journalism on a shoestring budget (like say Techdirt, or perhaps 404 Media, an outlet built by journalists fleeing the Vice bankruptcy idiocy). U.S. journalism desperately needs aggressive, creative, young minds with new ideas for coverage and funding. Folks who understand that with a parade of authoritarian propagandists exploiting lazy journalism daily, that the hour for meaningful reform is getting late.
Instead, it's an industry dominated by the kind of trust fund brunchlord fail upward types that tend to congeal at the top of the food chain courtesy of inherited wealth, not competency. The kind of folks who prefer news simulacrum" as to avoid offending advertisers, sources, or event sponsors. The kind of folks that see AI not as an efficiency tool, but as a way to cut corners and attack already underpaid labor.
In other words, the very last people that should be spearheading any kind of meaningful journalistic revolution.