Wakeford had promised that The Messenger would offer an alternative to news organizations that “inflame the divisions in our country by slanting stories towards an audience’s bias,” but the first story at the top of the site was an interview with Donald Trump that no few observers characterized as a softball. Based on the reaction of many media veterans, though, seeing The Messenger in the flesh has done nothing to quell the skepticism, and may even have exacerbated it. On Monday, that changed, as the site finally launched. The New York Post, citing “industry insiders,” wrote that The Messenger risked becoming a “money pit helmed by old-school executives with delusional ambitions.” Max Tani, a media reporter at Semafor, wrote that he couldn’t figure out how the site would achieve the kinds of numbers Finkelstein had in mind, given that it would be “for a general-interest news website in a tough ad market on the diminished, post-Facebook web.” And Jacob Donnelly, the publisher of Morning Brew, predicted that The Messenger “will not have anywhere near 100 million monthly readers over the next five years,” because the days of “hacking your way to monumental traffic numbers are behind us,” a result of the platforms becoming “stingier with referral traffic.”Īll this before The Messenger had published a single story. Actually, some skepticism is a massive understatement. The Messenger ’s claims that it would chart a new, unbiased path were greeted with some skepticism in the media industry, as were its growth estimates. On the editorial side, according to the Times, Finkelstein planned to foster “an alternative to a national news media that he says has come under the sway of partisan influences.”
In March, no longer avoiding the spotlight, Finkelstein participated in a splashy profile in the New York Times and said that his new site would open with a hundred and seventy-five journalists, then grow to a total of five hundred and fifty by next year, with revenue of more than a hundred million dollars. In February, Axios reported that Jimmy Finkelstein, a former co-owner of The Hill and the Hollywood Reporter, had raised significant financing for a new media startup called The Messenger, which, Axios reported, had to that point “tried to avoid the spotlight, hiring dozens of executives and raising tens of millions of dollars mostly in secret.” Finkelstein also put some of his own money into the startup, Axios reported, having sold The Hill to Nexstar for a hundred and thirty million dollars The Messenger ’s early hires, meanwhile, included Dan Wakeford, an entertainment journalist and former editor in chief of People, and Neetzan Zimmerman, who was credited with boosting The Hill ’s social traffic and engagement.
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