Messenger Staff Learned Company Was Shutting Down from the New York Times

Employees at the short-lived news outlet The Messenger learned they were being laid off and that the website was shut down on Wednesday from a report in the New York Times.

Sources who worked at the outlet told Mediaite they heard about the demise of the company – and their jobs – from a report in the Times before they heard from the company itself.

James LaPorta, who worked as a national security reporter for The Messenger, also confirmed the claims in a post on social media.

“I just got laid off. One would expect to learn this news from their employer but instead, @TheMessenger employees learned of it via @nytimes and @semafor – there is no severance,” wrote LaPorta. “Healthcare will cease. I have to go clean out my desk from the DC office.”

In his report on The Messenger’s decision to close down less than a year after its launch, Semafor media reporter Max Tani noted that the “decision was made this afternoon” and had “not yet been announced to staff.”

Messenger founder Jimmy Finkelstein went on to announce the decision in an email to employees, telling them, “This is truly the last thing I wanted, and I am deeply sorry.”

He wrote, “The industry has faced extraordinary challenges this past year. The economic headwinds have left many media companies fighting for survival. Unfortunately, as a new company, we encountered even more significant challenges than others and could not survive those headwinds.”

The Messenger launched with 300 employees in May 2023 and had planned to expand with a further 500 members of staff in its first year. The news outlet was plagued with problems from the get-go, however, and received frequent criticism over its business model, editorial decisions, and unrealistic goals.

A former Messenger staffer broke down the abrupt shuttering of the start-up site to Mediaite’s Diana Falzone:

It’s really unfortunate how the whole thing played out. For the past month everyone was on pins and needles not knowing what to expect but despite that, everyone kept on working as best they could. We were all promised transparency about the situation, and in the end we didn’t get it. Was bad enough every one of us lost our jobs, but having to read about it on the New York Times website just added insult to injury. The entire staff was dedicated to the mission until the very end. It would’ve been nice to at least have that respect to let us know before the news dropped publicly. The reality is that the business model is now an antiquated business model. What worked in 2013 does not work today. You are seeing see it across the industry you can’t rely just program programmatic advertising anymore. The reason why you’re seeing newsrooms and organizations across the country hemorrhaging workers is because the ad revenue is dropping. The reality is advertisers that advertisers have plenty of other avenues to go down. It’s not a necessity for them to advertise on a news site anymore. The business model was definitely a factor. I also think it was the timing. It’s not an easy task to start a new venture when the entire industry is in flux. But I also think there could have been a little less boasting before the launch. It placed us under a high threshold for success right out of the gate.

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