Executives at The Messenger, a news startup, had big ambitions in the months leading up to its public debut. They said they would start with 175 journalists covering entertainment and politics, change journalism for the better and even make their audience “fall back in love” with the media.
But less than a week after it began, tensions are escalating.
Journalists have rejected demands to mass-produce articles based on competitor stories. Senior editors met with staff on Thursday to address criticism of the site, which was coming Columbia Journalism Journalfrom Harvard Nieman Laboratory i The Wrap, a Hollywood trade publication. And a policy editor resigned on Friday after a clash with the company’s head of hearing.
Much of the tension at The Messenger and critical coverage of the site stems from the company’s blitzkrieg approach to digital publishing. The company told The Times earlier this year that it aims to reach 100 million monthly readers, which would make it among the most-read publications in the United States, and has hired Neetzan Zimmerman, a well-known traffic expert digital, to get there. this aggressive goal by posting dozens of stories a day.
“The Messenger feels like a publication that was thrown together quickly,” said Ken Doctor, media analyst and founder of Lookout Local, a news company.
In a statement, The Messenger said the site is still in an early testing phase.
“We’ve delivered hundreds of pieces of great journalism and exceeded our traffic goals,” the statement said. “Our teams are successfully working through any initial issues with technology and workflow, and we’re confident they will be resolved when we fully launch with our industries and advertisers next month.”
The Messenger, founded by Jimmy Finkelstein, the former co-owner of The Hill and The Hollywood Reporter, has raised $50 million from investors including Josh Harris, co-founder of private equity giant Apollo. It moved quickly in the months leading up to its debut, hiring scores of reporters, some from major publications like Politico and CNN, with some lured by salaries well above the standard market rate, according to two people with knowledge of the recruiting efforts. the company.
The site has multiple teams dedicated to covering breaking news, which has led to confusion about who is working on what, according to five people familiar with the site’s inner workings who spoke on condition of anonymity because the rules of the company prevents unauthorized interviews with the media. . On a few occasions in the past week, The Messenger ran two versions of the same story, without the editors knowing what their co-workers were working on.
Those tensions came to a boiling point earlier in the week after one of The Messenger’s news teams assigned a story that had already been assigned by an editor on another team. Mr. Zimmerman warned editors in a group chat on the messaging platform Slack that they should use an online form to coordinate their story assignments. This guide was aimed at editors who prefer to use Slack for story planning.
After a back and forth between Mr. Zimmerman and a political editor, Gregg Birnbaum, in which Mr. Zimmerman wrote at one point that it was “quite simple to open the document and check,” and at another point he blamed the political team. for mixed signals, mr. Birnbaum said he had had enough.
“Wow, how condescending is that?” Mr. Birnbaum wrote, according to a copy of his message reviewed by The New York Times. “Thank you for the lecture.” He resigned the position and advised Mr. Zimmerman to find another policy editor who “doesn’t know what they’re doing so you can tell them what to do.”
In an interview, Mr. Birnbaum, who has previously worked at CNN, NBC News and The Miami Herald, confirmed that he wrote the Slack message.
“Who doesn’t like traffic to their news site?” he said in an email. “But the desperate blind and shaved pursuit of traffic – on the gerbil wheel endlessly rewriting story after story that has first appeared in other media in the hope that something, anything, will go viral – has been a shock to the system and a disappointment to many of The Messenger’s excellent journalists who are trying to focus on meaningful, original and distinctive reporting.”
Publishers met earlier this week to discuss concerns about the company’s high-volume approach to publishing. The five reporters, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said they had become frustrated with the company’s practice of assigning rewrites of competitors’ stories, a practice that was criticized by media critics after the release of the place
Dan Wakeford, The Messenger’s editor-in-chief, assured employees during the meetings that it would take months to build credibility at The Messenger and that they are taking “things out of context,” according to two of the five people. The company has secured an interview with former President Donald J. Trump and was the first to report Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ plan to aggressively campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in Iowa.
Although The Messenger has hired about 150 reporters, falling short of its initial goal, the company is still on track to meet its initial traffic goals, the two people said. A copy of The Messenger’s internal traffic dashboard from Friday reviewed by The Times shows the company was close to surpassing 100,000 unique visitors for the day. A person familiar with the company’s hiring efforts said the company was on track to reach its goal of 175 employees within weeks.
The Messenger expects its traffic to grow in the coming weeks as it rises through Google’s search ranking algorithm, said one of five people familiar with the company’s inner workings. The company’s emphasis on clicks is reflected in the company’s employee “playbook,” which was reviewed by The Times. Employees, the playbook says, should ask themselves three questions before writing a story.
“Would you click on that?” the guidelines say, according to the copy. “Would you read everything? Would you share it?”
