MESSENGER, KILLED: The Messenger is shutting down.
The Messenger was founded by [Jimmy] Finkelstein in 2023, two years after he sold The Hill — a Beltway-based print and digital publication co-founded by Finkelstein’s father in 1994 — to Nexstar for $130 million.
- Finkelstein had previously co-founded a media holding group that purchased outlets like Adweek, Billboard and The Hollywood Reporter from Nielsen in 2009.
- The Messenger hired 300 people across a few short months and paid them above market wage.
The big picture: The Messenger was built on the flawed premise that a big, generic news audience has value. It doesn’t anymore.
As John Nolte wrote on Wednesday: The Messenger Looks Like Another Doomed Corporate Media Outlet.
Over the last eight months, I cannot remember a single instance where The Messenger hit my radar. And in this media environment where billions of corporate media dollars are spent to protect Democrats and cover up their corruption and scandals, it is not difficult for an outlet with $50 million to stand out. But first, they have to stand up. The formula is simple: all a Messenger has to do is use those 500 journalists to hold Democrats as accountable as the corporate media holds Republicans. The result would be phenomenal. Millions of normal people starved for the truth will flock to you. That’s what Breitbart does, and we’re hiring.
These Messenger people are just stupid. There is a huge void in news coverage half the country is waiting to see filled, but rather than make money and do journalism, these idiots protect their access and status. The front page of The Messenger is a joke filled with dull headlines you can read anywhere. It doesn’t look much better than those AI sites that create a front page by scraping from other sites.
As I wrote on Tuesday, the “Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Conde Nast, Sports Illustrated, Gawker, Jezebel, BuzzFeed News, Vice, and CNN are all shuttered or shrinking.”
So we can now add The Messenger to the good riddance pile.
There may be another eventually joining them: Is Courier Newsroom really fighting fake news?
“We are not the Fox News of the left,” says Tara McGowan. “We are legitimate journalism.” We are sitting in the lobby bar of the Edition Hotel in Manhattan as McGowan tells me about Courier, the network of local-news outlets she founded in 2019 after a successful career in Democratic politics.
Courier, in McGowan’s telling, “is a network of pro-democracy newsrooms across the country that reach passive news consumers where they are with good factual local news and reporting.” McGowan rejects allegations that Courier is a partisan political operation masquerading as a news outlet. Courier isn’t pro-Democratic Party, she says. It’s “pro-democracy.” On the basis of that pitch, McGowan, an adept political operator, has raised millions from billionaire donors and grown the company into ten newsrooms across the United States.
Despite the apparent success of Courier, however, journalists who have worked at the outlet say the ideals it publicly professes are a far cry from reality. “What she’s saying is objectively not true,” one former Courier reporter told me. “I know that that’s her line that she uses to justify it and make it seem like it’s a media company. But no. They hired journalists and then gave them explicit instructions to promote Democrats.”
Finally: Someone is thinking of using the news media as if they were Democratic party operatives with bylines — fortunately, there’s no competition there, and there hasn’t been for over half a century!
