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The company’s high volume of virtual publishing has led to duplicate stories and alienate some of its journalists. At least one editor has already resigned.
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By Benjamin Mullin
The leaders of The Messenger, a news startup, had big ambitions in the months leading up to their public debut. They said they would start with 175 hounds covering entertainment and politics, replace journalism with a bigger one, and even achieve their “fall in love with” the media again.
But more than a week after its launch, tension is rising.
Journalists were angered by requests to mass-produce articles based on the competing stories. The editors met with staff Thursday to respond to the site’s complaint, which came from Columbia Journalism Review, Harvard’s Nieman Lab and The Wrap, a Hollywood industry publication. And a politician resigned on Friday after a run-in with the company’s audience manager.
Much of the tension at The Messenger and the site’s critical politics stems from the company’s lightning approach to virtual publishing. The company told The Times earlier this year that it aims to reach a hundred million readers a month, which would make it one of the most important. Most read publications in the U. S. , and hired Neetzan Zimmerman, a well-known virtual traffic expert, to succeed in that competitive goal by publishing dozens of stories a day.
“The Messenger feels like a rushed post,” Ken Doctor, media analyst and founder of Lookout Local, a news company.
In a statement, The Messenger said it is still in an early testing phase.
“We delivered a bunch of quality news stories and exceeded our traffic targets,” he said. “Our groups are working effectively on all workflow and initial generation issues, and we are confident that they will be resolved at full launch next month with our verticals and advertisers. “
The Messenger, founded through Jimmy Finkelstein, former co-owner of The Hill and The Hollywood Reporter, has raised $50 million from investors who added Josh Harris, co-founder of personal justice giant Apollo. It evolved in the months leading up to its debut, hiring dozens of journalists, some from major publications like Politico and CNN, some lured by salaries well above the popular market rate, according to two other people familiar with the company’s hiring efforts.
He has several groups committed to covering the latest news, which has led to confusion about who works on what, according to five other people familiar with the inner workings of the . . . At some events over the past week, The Messenger has published two versions of the same story, with editors not knowing what their colleagues 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 attributed by an editor on another team. Way to coordinate your story assignments. This recommendation was opposed by publishers who liked to use Slack for story planning.
After a tug-of-war between Mr. Zimmerman and a political editor, Gregg Birnbaum, in which Mr. Zimmerman wrote at one point that “it’s quite undeniable to open the document and check it,” and at another point blamed the political team for the combined signals, Mr. Birnbaum said he’d had enough.
“Wow, how condescending is that?” Birnbaum wrote, according to a copy of his revised message through The New York Times. “Thank you for the conference. ” He resigned without delay and begged Mr. Zimmerman to track down some other politician who “doesn’t know what he’s doing, so he can tell him what to do. “
In an interview, Birnbaum, who in the past worked for CNN, NBC News and The Miami Herald, showed that he wrote the Slack message.
“Who doesn’t love traffic to their news site?” he said in an email. But the desperate and blind search for traffic, through the gerbil wheel nonstop, rewriting story after story that first gave the impression in other media outlets in the hope that something, anything, would go viral, has been a surprise to the formula and a sadness to many of The Messenger’s high-quality news hounds looking for meaningful reporting. original and distinctive.
Editors met earlier in the week to discuss considerations about the company’s high-volume publishing strategy. The five bloodhounds who spoke on condition of anonymity said they had become frustrated with the company’s practice of attributing rewrites of competing stories, a practice that was denounced through media critics after the site’s launch.
Dan Wakeford, editor of The Messenger, assured workers at the meetings that The Messenger would take months to gain credibility and that critics of the site were taking “things out of context,” according to two of the five people. interview with former President Donald J. Trump and the first to report on Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ plan to make an aggressive crusade for the Republican presidential nomination in Iowa.
Although The Messenger has hired about 150 news hounds, based on its initial purpose, the company is still on track to meet its initial traffic purposes, the other two people said. way to exceed 100,000 exclusive visitors for the day. A user familiar with the company’s hiring efforts said the company is on track to achieve its goal of 175 workers in a matter of weeks.
Messenger expects its traffic to pile up in the coming weeks as it grows thanks to Google’s search ranking algorithm, said one of five other people familiar with the inner workings of the company. The company’s focus on clicks is reflected in the company’s “playbook. “workers, which was reviewed through The Times. According to the playbook, workers ask themselves 3 questions before writing a story.
“Would I click on it?” The rules say, according to the copy “Would you read everything?The percentage?
Benjamin Mullin is a media reporter for The Times, covering news and entertainment from major corporaciones. @benmullin
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