They say don’t shoot the messenger, but what if the messenger shot himself?
The Messenger startup burst onto the media scene last May with a $50 million round, aggressively recruiting journalists to build an “unbiased” digital newsroom. Instead, its employees discovered through a New York Times article today that the publication would be shutting down. According to employees’ social media sites SupportsLaid-off workers will not receive any severance pay, and their health care coverage will end.
“The last thing I saw in the slack on The Messenger was a panicked colleague writing ‘Wait, what about our insurance coverage, I’m having surgery, and then we’re all fired!!!’” journalist Jordan Hoffman said in an X post.
The journalism industry has not had a great year, in part because… Declining digital ad sales Across the board. But Al-Rasul’s collapse was shockingly terrible, even at a time when three thousand journalists were laid off last year.
Founded by Jimmy Finkelstein (former owner of The Hollywood Reporter and The Hill), The Messenger lost about $38 million of its seed capital and had only generated $3 million by late last year, per New York times. At the launch, Finkelstein claimed the company would grow $100 million in revenue After her first year, but it only lasted about nine months.
The messenger was trying to raise additional capital in the hours before its demise. But it failed to secure the funding it needed, raising the question of why the publication needed to raise more money so quickly, anyway.
“Over the past few weeks, and literally last night, we have exhausted every available option and sought to raise sufficient capital to achieve profitability,” Finkelstein wrote. “Unfortunately, we were unable to do so, which is why we have not shared the news with you yet. This is truly the last thing I wanted, and I am deeply sorry.”
Like almost every other company that has laid off workers in the past few years, Finkelstein cited vague “economic headwinds” in his memo to employees about the closure (which, we can’t stress enough, came after Employees learned they lost their jobs from a New York Times article.) However, Finkelstein did not address how so much money could be burned so quickly.
From the beginning, the media experts Skeptical For The Messenger’s game plan, which was to leverage social media referral traffic to generate ad revenue. This strategy for a media company may have worked fifteen years ago, but this is not the boom era of BuzzFeed (just look at that company’s stock price). At launch, Neiman Laboratory He pointed out that the Messenger was publishing a new story every two minutes, some of which were no more than one sentence in length. Although Finkelstein’s ambitions to build an unbiased and widespread media machine were ambitious, they were ultimately doomed to failure. Unfortunately, this failure means financial uncertainty and unstable health care coverage for its workers.
“I can’t imagine doing this to anyone.” books Former Messenger employee Madeline Fitzgerald on X. “I don’t do that [know] Why do you treat employees this way?”