The early demise of a well-hyped, well-funded publication founded by an entitled man who had said he’d show other newsroom leaders what they’d been doing wrong may not rank as news these days. But in death, the Messenger achieved something it struggled to do in life: standing out from the rest of the industry.

That publication’s shutdown Wednesday, having burned through $50 million in funding in eight months, didn’t just see journalists learning about the imminent demise of their employment in such no-class ways as surprise payouts of unused vacation time and then forced logouts from their Slack workspace. Within hours of management announcing the Messenger’s closure, they also took the entire site down, breaking links to every story published there.

Climate and science journalist Dave Levitan, who came to the Messenger unwittingly after that publication bought his former employer Grid News, put it well in a pithy, profane Bluesky post: “Killing the site entirely within like two hours of announcing its closure is so fucking cruel to all the people who just want to save their clips to try and get new jobs. To, what, avoid paying another month’s hosting fees or something? Fuck off.”

That’s the same kind of online vandalism that Chicago plutocrat Joe Ricketts pulled briefly in 2017 after closing the DNAInfo and Gothamist family of local-news sites a day after New York-based staffers had voted to unionize. But those sites reappeared a day later, and local public-radio affiliates then bought and resurrected the New York, D.C, and Los Angeles sites.

(I appreciate WAMU’s rescue of DCist even more after seeing the Washington Post move to curtail its local coverage.)

No such out-of-the-morgue revival seems in store for the Messenger, but it also left less for people to miss. Would-be media mogul Jimmy Finkelstein, who had previously co-owned the Hollywood Reporter and the Hill, launched the site last May with the aforementioned $50 million in funding and 175 journalists on staff in NYC, D.C. and L.A., telling the New York Times’ Benjamin Mullin last March that he aimed to expand the newsroom to 550 employees in a year. He promised a vague sort of both-sidesy coverage and evoked the decades-ago influence of 60 Minutes and Vanity Fair, saying “I really want to do something that changes journalism a bit and changes America for the good.”

The headlines of two subsequent NYT stories by Mullin about the Messenger show how well that went. “Tensions Flare Inside The Messenger, a Fledgling News Site,” posted last May, recounted journalists chafing at clumsy editorial demands to write clickbait rewrites of stories elsewhere that led to duplicate coverage; “The Messenger, Which Aimed to Transform Media, Faces Dire Financial Straits,” ran above a Jan. 4 report that the site had made only $3 million in revenue last year and was down to $1.8 million in cash.

Now those ambitions are ashes. The content-farm chum won’t be missed, but people also did good and useful work there that now only exists as Internet Archive copies (see, for example, this copy of a post by Levitan about global warming drying out aquifers). It stinks, but especially after two weeks that also saw Time magazine can 15% of unionized editorial staffers, billionaire Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong lay off more than 20 percent of the newsroom, Business Insider dump 8% of its staff, and the Wall Street Journal gut its D.C. bureau by sacking about 20 journalists there.

There are many things ailing the business of journalism–I would point to a Google stranglehold on the online display-ads business that is now the subject of antitrust litigation by the Department of Justice and dozens of states–that are external to anything newsrooms can do on their own. But my profession’s plague of mean, mediocre managers who act as if their journalists are bipedal cost centers is especially infurating, because no number of newly-unemployed reporters seems high enough to stop the likes of Jimmy Finkelstein from failing upwards.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/02/02/the-least-classy-way-possible-to-close-a-publication/