Nearly two weeks after closing up shop on The Messenger and suddenly leaving hundreds of employees out in the cold, the “centrist” news site’s CEO Jimmy Finkelstein finally sat down for a lengthy interview with Axios to discuss his startup’s spectacular flameout.
Besides maintaining that his business model would have eventually been successful if investors had just given him more cash, Finkelstein also told Axios that he is now weighing severance payments to out-of-work staffers. At the same time, he also said it was “wonderful” that his ex-employees had started a GoFundMe to raise $50,000 to help their colleagues pay bills.
Needless to say, Finkelstein’s tone-deaf remarks were not taken kindly by those he abruptly left without a job.
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“Acting like a Scooby-Doo villain,” one former Messenger breaking news reporter told The Daily Beast, with another ex-staffer calling his comments “Lucille Bluth-style rich person delusion.”
Finkelstein did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In his sit-down with Axios, the 76-year-old media mogul portrayed himself as the victim of negative press and the economic headwinds facing the media industry as a whole. While boasting about his legacy of past “successful media ventures,” he also insisted that if investors had just had a little more faith in him, he would have made the site profitable within months.
“I have absolute confidence that by August we would have been profitable. If we raised the $20 million, we would have been absolutely profitable,” Finkelstein told Axios. “So I think that our model—which everybody decided on their own was an old model, it's just not their model—was working.”
The Messenger, which was launched last spring with $50 million of start-up funds, only pulled in $3 million of revenue by the end of 2023. At the start of January, the company was down to its last $1.8 million and only had “weeks” to live.
With the company facing dire financial straits, Finkelstein still publicly expressed optimism about the site’s fortunes, saying that “the notion of us discussing closure is beyond absurd.” The company told The New York Times they had booked as much advertising revenue in January as all of 2023 combined, and that The Messenger had already raised an additional $10 million in funding.
During the Axios interview, though, Finkelstein insisted that the Times misinterpreted the quotes and he instead meant that they had booked advertisers “in the month of January” and not for that month, saying the money would have eventually come in. (The Times denied the quotes were misinterpreted.) Sources told Axios, meanwhile, that Finkelstein had intentionally misled the Times with that figure.
Rejecting the notion that his company over-hired at the beginning and had unrealistic spending levels, Finkelstein also said he felt remorse for the nearly 300 terminated staffers. “At the end of the day, there's only one person who deserves the blame, and that's me,” he asserted.
Still, he seemed noncommittal over the possibility of paying severance out of his own pocket, even though he’s a multimillionaire who maintains homes in the Hamptons and West Palm Beach. “I put a lot of money into this site at the end to keep it going,” he declared to Axios.
Making matters worse is the fact that before the site suddenly shuttered at the end of January, The Messenger had laid off nearly two dozen staffers, who all received severance pay. Those who stayed until the end, though, were left with nothing—even though the company’s employee guidebook specifically said severance would be paid in the event of mass layoffs or restructuring.
Some higher-paid reporters and editors, as first reported by Puck and confirmed by The Daily Beast, also had clauses written into their contracts that they would receive up to several months of severance if terminated without cause. Meanwhile, employees have filed a class-action lawsuit against Finkelstein demanding severance pay and benefits—though it’s now feared that Finkelstein’s LLC will declare bankruptcy to avoid any obligations to ex-staffers and vendors.
“There are some things I might consider doing,” he told Axios when asked if he was trying to make good on paying his ex-employees. “We are gathering all of our assets and we’ll see what happens.”
As for the employee lawsuit claiming that he violated New York labor laws by not giving advance notice of massive layoffs, Finkelstein said “we are not concerned with that.” On the other hand, the staffers’ GoFundMe he described as “wonderful.” As one would expect, those comments were not well-received by ex-employees, especially in their private Slack group to air grievances about the “deliberately cruel” way Finkelstein handled the shuttering of the site.
“We’re all, frankly, disgusted with his behavior!” a former Messenger reporter told The Daily Beast. “How dare he call a GoFundMe set up to help colleagues who were left in a horrible position because of his awful (and unethical) business decisions… ‘wonderful.’”
Other fired staffers not only piggybacked on that sentiment but expressed fear at the tough financial times they are already facing due to their abrupt job losses.
“Talk is cheap, but Jimmy might be even cheaper,” a former employee who asked not to be named due to their ongoing job search. “Former staffers have no faith in him to do the right thing, considering how swiftly he pulled the rug out from everyone last month. There are people who are truly struggling without pay or healthcare, and the fact that we have to crowdsource to help them get by right now is something he should be ashamed of and certainly not call it ‘wonderful.’”
A former member of the visuals team, meanwhile, noted that while Finkelstein cheered on the employee fundraiser from the sidelines, he hasn’t continued anything towards it. (On the other hand, the site’s former editor-in-chief Dan Wakeford recently contributed $1,500.)
“Jimmy needs three Muppet ghosts to visit him during the night and bonk him over the head,” they said. “This is Lucille Bluth-style rich person delusion. I’m sure his country club membership fees alone could pay off the balance on my mortgage.”
The ex-staffer added: “If he thinks it’s so ‘wonderful’ that we have to beg other underpaid journalists for money to survive, why hasn’t he contributed anything? At least I got my food stamps card activated today so I won’t starve to death.”
With sources also telling The Daily Beast that Finkelstein is “brooding” and contemplating “how to exact his revenge against his former employees for badmouthing him to reporters,” another breaking news reporter said the media mogul is “acting like a Scooby-Doo villain.”
It isn’t just former employees who aren’t holding back when it comes to Finkelstein’s handling of the severance pay issue. Axios co-founder Jim VandeHei, who had essentially called Finkelstein “a snake oil salesman” after The Messenger collapsed, lit into the ex-Hill owner following his interview with, incidentally, Axios.
“How in the hell do you live in Palm Beach and own a mansion in the Hamptons and say you can’t pay severance and healthcare for people who risked their careers for you?” VandeHei told Puck. “This is why people hate the rich. We all make tough business decisions with unfortunate human consequences. That’s the tough stuff of ownership. How you handle those shit moments defines you. I will gladly rescind my comments and applaud Jimmy if he does right by the people he made promises to, many in writing, to provide severance and healthcare. Hiding behind his LLC might be legal, but it’s lame.”
College hoops insider Seth Davis, one of The Messenger’s splashy editorial hires, praised VandeHei’s fiery reaction. “Preach! I have no idea how Jimmy Finkelstein lives with himself,” Davis tweeted.
Meanwhile, The Messenger’s former employees continue to be subjected to further indignities following the implosion of the company.
Following Finkelstein’s edict that all company-owned equipment be returned to The Messenger’s New York headquarters in the wake of its haphazard shuttering, former Deputy Business and Finance Editor Dawn Kopecki revealed on Thursday that her laptop was sent back when she tried to return it. And she was charged for the delivery.
“So I sent my work laptop back to @TheMessenger to the address and with the FedEx number as requested and it arrived on my doorstep with a new label over the original one yesterday,” she tweeted. “The kicker: It says ‘bill recipient,’ which apparently is me.”
