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On Wednesday, online news site The Messenger shut down abruptly. The site, which expired after less than a year of operation, represents one of the biggest failures in online journalism after launching with over $50 million in funding.
Messenger staff members were reportedly given no warning and only learned about the closing from reading the news at other sites. Staff were unable to retrieve personal items from offices and could no longer log into their company accounts. They were reportedly given no severance pay, and their health insurance was cut off immediately.
Worst of all, The Messenger owners deleted the site’s content. For the writers and staff of the news site, that means all their work from the past year was turned to digital dust in an instant. The Messenger’s former staff is left unable to retrieve the stories that could be vital to finding their next job. Sites that referenced The Messenger are now left with links that go nowhere. The information contained in all the site’s articles, op-eds, and photographs is now simply gone.
The Messenger launched as a general news outlet, covering everything from politics to sports. Funding was largely based on ad sales, and in a market where everyone is seeing massive declines in ad revenue and journalism jobs are evaporating at an increasing pace, proclamations that the site would generate $100 million in revenue during 2024 never made much sense. Even so, founder and CEO Jimmy Finkelstein was reportedly close to securing additional funding before the deal fell through and the site was abruptly closed.
The funding that The Messenger had at the outset, and big plans announced by Finkelstein, allowed the organization to lure reporters and other staff away from major media outlets. Barely 11 months later, the staff is departing without severance pay, health care, or any other benefits.
Finkelstein pocketed $130 million from the 2021 sale of The Hill, which was founded by his father in 1994. Apparently, none of that money could be spared to give his former employees a few weeks of health insurance or anything to cushion this blow.
As The Messenger was disappearing, the staff of the Chicago Tribune went out on strike Thursday for the first time in the paper’s 177-year history. Editors joined reporters and photographers on the picket line as they marched against the paper’s owners, Alden Global Capital, which has been described as a “hedge fund vampire” by Vanity Fair, and as “a secretive hedge fund that has quickly, and with remarkable ease, become one of the largest newspaper operators in the country” by The Atlantic.
Alden Global Capital purchased the Chicago Tribune in 2021, and what’s happened to the paper since then goes beyond the general decline other local papers have been facing. While the new billionaire owner of The Baltimore Sun may have shown up at the office just long enough to dress down the staff with a derogatory tirade while letting them know he didn’t actually read the paper he had just purchased, the Chicago Tribune’s new owners didn’t even put in that much effort. They just immediately moved to gutting the place.
Two days after the deal was finalized, Alden announced an aggressive round of buyouts. In the ensuing exodus, the paper lost the Metro columnist who had championed the occupants of a troubled public-housing complex, and the editor who maintained a homicide database that the police couldn’t manipulate, and the photographer who had produced beautiful portraits of the state’s undocumented immigrants, and the investigative reporter who’d helped expose the governor’s offshore shell companies. When it was over, a quarter of the newsroom was gone.
Now Alden has confronted the remaining staff with an offer that would eliminate the company match for 401(k) retirement funds, block pay increases, and drastically reduce bonuses already due under the previous contract.
But even as the Chicago Tribune is being decimated, the owners are dealing with the workers, and those workers can strike to bring attention to their cause. Those who have left have been recipients of a buyout.
That’s a big step up from finding the office door closed in your face and all your work deleted.
This is a good illustration of why workers at The Texas Tribune are moving to unionize. The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit organization and an award-winning newsroom. How it is structured and its ability to sustain itself in the increasingly grim market for news has been of great interest to other sites looking for alternatives.
Last summer, the Tribune was forced to conduct the first layoffs in its 14-year history, showing that there is no safe space in this storm. (Daily Kos has not been immune to this industry downturn, and conducted the first layoffs in the site’s 20-year history in 2023.)
At the Texas Tribune layoffs included the entire copy desk team. (Note: That’s a real horror story for anyone who commits as much comma-cide as I do.)
The Texas Tribune’s management has been supportive of the union effort. “Our response is simple,” wrote CEO Sonal Shah. “If Tribune employees want to be represented by a union, we will respect their right to representation.”
In this environment, with major media outlets seemingly failing by the day, even workers at publications as consistently excellent as The Texas Tribune can’t take their status for granted.
Meanwhile, New York Magazine has a view on the final days of The Messenger from a writer who rode the wreck down.
When I tell you I was the film critic and a senior entertainment writer for The Messenger, you’ll have to take me at my word. The website is a blank white page now — the most terrifying image for any writer — with just the company’s name and an email address. I doubt any correspondence sent there will be returned.
(Warning: False social media accounts have materialized pretending to be some of The Messenger’s better-known writers, likely to deceptively tap into Venmo, GoFundMe, BuyMeACoffee, and other demonstrations of goodwill aimed at the displaced workers, so take care.)
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