WEST PALM BEACH, Florida, EE.UU. —
The Messenger, an ambitious news website that billed itself as a nonpartisan digital outlet and invested about $50 million to boost its business, unexpectedly closed Wednesday after just eight months in operation.
Founder Jimmy Finkelstein sent an email to surprised employees announcing the immediate closure, which will mean the departure of about 300 journalists and other workers, according to The New York Times, the outlet that first broke the news. .
Jim LaPorta, a reporter for The Messenger, said he and other colleagues learned of his firing through the Times and other news reports.
“I just got fired,” he posted on X. “There is no severance pay. Health insurance will cease. I have to go clean my desk in the Washington office.”
Finkelstein noted in his email that he had not shared the news with employees sooner because he was desperately trying to raise enough funds to be profitable, “literally until early this morning.”
“We exhausted all available options,” wrote Finkelstein, who said he was “personally devastated.”
As of Wednesday night, only the name and an email address appeared on The Messenger’s website.
Finkelstein said in his email that “economic setbacks have left many media companies struggling to survive.”
In fact, The Messenger’s collapse comes after massive layoffs at once powerful and influential outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, which last week reduced the size of its newsroom by 20%, as well as Sports Illustrated and Business Insider. Planned cuts have also caused many employees to leave their jobs at other media outlets, such as the New York Daily News and Forbes magazine.
The Messenger launched last May and spared no expense—some would say excessive, given the current media environment—in hopes of becoming a benchmark.
The company hired experienced journalists from large organizations, including The Associated Press, rented multimillion-dollar offices in New York, Washington, D.C., and Florida, and set an ambitious goal of generating enough traffic to reach a monthly audience of 100. millions of readers.
At most, the page generated barely a quarter of that. It never posted a profit, and depleted its funds as its advertising revenue fell.
According to critics, Finkelstein’s was an outdated business model that depended on circulation on social networks and search engines to attract readers.
BuzzFeed News, a Pulitzer Prize-winning digital outlet, also fell victim to that model. CEO Jonah Peretti announced last April that the site would close after failing to make a profit, saying it was slow to accept the fact that “the big platforms do not provide the distribution or financial support required to support the free, world-class journalism built expressly for social networks.”
2024-02-02 05:46:56
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