“We’re like the Fyre Festival of media,” an ex-reporter from the Messenger tells me. It had been one week since his employer had shut down the news Web site in spectacular, shocking fashion—deleting all the site’s articles, deactivating employee badges and Slack channels, and refusing to pay severance. The parallels to the doomed music festival—not to mention Quibi, New Coke, and the Titanic—are real.
The Messenger was the brainchild—if we can be so kind—of publisher Jimmy Finkelstein, who managed to raise $50 million from investors for a start-up idea straight out of 2013: a something-for-everyone Web site that would stay studiously nonpartisan and turn a profit through old-fashioned ad sales. The Web site’s launch was one of the biggest media stories of 2023, both for its ambition—building a national news brand from scratch—and its arrogance.
