Troubled digital media start-up The Messenger is potentially on its last legs financially and could only have enough cash to stay operational for “weeks,” sources told The Daily Beast.
Semafor first reported on Wednesday that the board of the site met last week and weighed whether to shut down The Messenger after learning it would run out of money by the end of January.
Following the publication of Semafor’s story, according to screenshots shared with The Daily Beast, staffers at The Messenger began panicking and begged management to address their growing concerns about the publisher’s financial health on the company’s general Slack message board.
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The Slack conversations grew increasingly fraught throughout the afternoon, essentially blowing up into a full-scale mutiny. It especially escalated after one of the outlet’s star reporters urged his colleagues not to air their grievances on the public forum as it would “just generate another negative story” about The Messenger and add fuel to the fire for the site’s critics.
Eventually, the site’s public relations flack Kimberly Bernhardt—and not the outlet’s embattled editor-in-chief Dan Wakeford—jumped into the fray to quell the surging insurrection, letting reporters know that the site’s owner would soon be personally addressing their concerns.
“The cuts are complete, and we are not planning any further layoffs,” Bernhardt told The Daily Beast in a statement. “We have already secured investment as part of our second raise, and so the notion of us discussing closure is beyond absurd.”
After raising $50 million, former Hill owner Jimmy Finkelstein launched The Messenger last spring as a “centrist” nonpartisan news outlet. Besides claiming that he was devoted to stripping bias out of the news, Finkelstein and president Richard Beckman made pie-in-the-sky promises about The Messenger’s potential.
In a splashy New York Times profile ahead of the site’s official debut, Beckman predicted that the publication would generate $100 million of revenue by 2024, largely due to the site’s advertising and events. Amid promises that the site would quickly deliver 100 million views a month, The Messenger quickly hired 150 journalists with plans to build the newsroom to 550 staffers.
The hiring, however, stalled at 300 employees. Reporters soon began complaining about Wakeford’s lack of communication with the staff, noting that he’d all but disappeared amid rumors about the growing cash crunch the site was facing. Beckman, who earned the nickname “Mad Dog” for his brutish management style at Conde Nast, clashed with the site’s business executives, prompting several to leave within months.
Meanwhile, Beckman began telling employees this past fall that the site was “out of money” and layoffs could be coming soon. In the end, Beckman announced this week that he was leaving at the end of the month due to “health issues.” After The New York Times reported that roughly two dozen employees would be terminated this week amid “dwindling” reserves, Finkelstein acknowledged to staffers that layoffs were commencing.
In the wake of Beckman’s impending departure, three sources told The Daily Beast there is only enough money to keep the place going for “weeks, not months.”
And according to Semafor, Finkelstein and the company’s board debated the financial crisis the site was facing in a meeting last Friday. Considering that The Messenger only had a few weeks of money to survive, steep cuts to payroll would be needed to extend the site’s life in order to give it more time to secure additional funding, Semafor reported. Furthermore, Finkelstein is reportedly weighing selling the site.
In the wake of the Semafor story going live, the general Slack board at The Messenger went into full meltdown mode on Wednesday afternoon.
In recent months, employees have practically begged Wakeford and management to hold a town hall to address the staff’s concerns over the rumors of the outlet’s money problems and editorial issues regarding AI. However, reports that the site was on its last legs seemed to be the last straw for many staffers.
“Would really love a town hall, as has been requested multiple times,” one reporter declared.
“The general lack of communication in all of this has been extremely frustrating,” another staffer stated, prompting a colleague to add: “At this point, it’s disrespectful.”
Eventually, staffers began tagging Wakeford in Slack, to no avail. All the while, employees demanded someone from leadership to break the silence, letting Wakeford know that if he’s “not the person who can give us answers” could he at least “let us know who is.”
Another reporter said that while they all came to The Messenger because they “believed in the mission and wanted the challenge of building something amazing,” staffers have not been given that opportunity because “leadership sees fit to keep us in the dark instead of treating us as adults and entrusting us with the task we all came here to do.”
At this point, one of the outlet’s top political reporters pushed back and implored his colleagues to take the conversation offline so that it wouldn’t make its way into another story about The Messenger’s dysfunction.
“I beg of everyone to understand that—while these criticisms are valid and understandable—the more we share them publicly in this forum or others, the higher the likelihood there is that this will just generate another negative story by those outlets and critics who have worked so hard to kill us,” he wrote. “We can’t control what’s going to happen on the revenue side. But we can control the reporting we produce and we can control how much we share about our concerns—knowing that bad-faith actors will only revel in our distress.”
Others soon sounded off, noting that they wouldn’t be airing these concerns in Slack if they’d been given “better transparency,” adding that the message board insurgency wouldn’t be necessary if leadership just offered a “little bit of dialogue” on the company’s health. One reporter explained that it “sucks to be blindsided by reports” on The Messenger by other news outlets.
After the star journalist said he wasn’t telling “anyone to be silent” but rather urging caution, Bernhardt jumped in and told the forum that Finkelstein would soon be meeting with employees.
“Jimmy will meet with the different verticals by zoom over the coming days. I will be setting up these meetings in the next day or so. Please reach out to me with any questions,” Bernhardt wrote.
