Shoot The Messenger, Not the Staff
I predicted the death of Jimmy Finkelstein’s The Messenger as soon as I read about its impending launch back in March of last year. At the time I had just soft-landed The Recount and was licking three decades of wounds related to launching, running, selling and shuttering digital media startups. And lo! Here was a guy claiming he was going to solve all of digital media’s woes with…what exactly? “Polyperspectivity”?! (No, really, that’s what they called their approach to news coverage.) And a business model ripped from the pages of Business Insider, circa 2012? I was already shaking my head, but then I read this:
“Richard Beckman, a former president of The Hill and Condé Nast who will be The Messenger’s president, said in an interview that the company planned to generate more than $100 million in revenue next year, primarily through advertising and events, with profitability expected that year.”
$100 million in revenue in…its first year!!? Hell, I launched the fastest growing publishing company in history, and it took us three years to get past that number -and we did it in during the biggest boom in the history of tech publishing, with a print model at its center. Then we fell off a cliff! How on earth was some random digital news startup going to… Oh, wait. They weren’t. Dudes were utterly fooling themselves, fooling their credulous investors, and worst of…
