What Happened to The Messenger Is a Warning that There is No System Left to Game

By Dustin Rowles | Social Media | February 1, 2024 |

By Dustin Rowles | Social Media | February 1, 2024 |

Journalism is in a weird place right now. It used to be that newspapers were our only source for news, and they thrived — there were often competing newspapers in the same small towns! Then the Internet came along and Craigslist killed a major source of revenue in classified ads, and over the years, readers transitioned from newspapers people in cars chucked into their yards every morning to receiving the news from those same newspapers online. That was fine, and newspapers even managed to gain readers from around the country they never otherwise had access to from Google searches. Then Facebook came along, and instead of killing online news, Facebook sent millions and millions and millions of page views toward online news outlets, and it was amazing. We even convinced ourselves that we were the reason all that traffic came to our websites!

But then the 2016 election came along and everyone got mad at Zuckerberg because Facebook was spreading misinformation, and slowly, Zuck began to realize that the news racket wasn’t worth it. Facebook stopped sending traffic to news sites and instead relied on crazy uncles with insane conspiracy theories to drive traffic. Elon Musk bought Twitter and killed it as a semi-effective traffic generator for news sites, and now these news sites can’t generate enough traffic to support themselves because they’ve all been bought by tech-bros more interested in turning a dime than fulfilling a civic duty.

What’s happening now is that while Google still provides a modest amount of traffic to sites with sizable archives, in order for most sites to sustain themselves, people have to type in the URLs of those sites, bookmark them, or otherwise intentionally visit that site. There is no system or algorithms left to game; people just have to like and remember a website enough to visit that site day after day. Meanwhile, all these newspaper sites are shuttering or laying off people because $10 in digital ad revenue for every 1,000 visitors isn’t a sustainable model for news-gathering organizations that no longer benefit from millions of page views from Facebook.

Last year a guy named Jimmy Finkelstein, who used to own the D.C. online outlet The Hill, looked into the journalism abyss and said, “You know what? I will be the exception! I will make this dying model work!” Reader: He did not. Finklestein invested $50 million into The Messenger, lured superstar journalists away from their newspaper jobs with huge salaries, and projected that the site could make $100 million in 2024 by wasting some of his talented writers on aggregating news and using some others to pump out centrist opinions. It made $3 million in its first nine months.

There’s no one more delusional in America right now than centrists (see also The No Labels Party), who think that, in their heart of hearts, most Americans want objective news when most Americans think objective outlets like NPR are peddling a liberal agenda because no one even knows what objective news is anymore, including The Messenger, which at one point built a piece around a Libs of Tik Tik post.

The point is: The Messenger failed, and it flamed out quickly. It ran through that $50 million in 9 months. Yesterday, it shut down in what the Times called “one of the biggest busts in the annals of online news.” The 300 people it had hired during its short existence no longer have jobs with The Messenger. No severance was offered. Most employees found out that their outlet had been shut down from other news sources.

The old model is dying. Clickbait is pointless without Facebook, and the last thing a news outlet wants to do is piss off a reader it wants to intentionally return the next day. Tech bros cannot manipulate an algorithm because, again, there is no system left to gain! We have to get by on our ability to honestly attract readers. With some exceptions, news organizations will get smaller. There will still be some effective journalists, but not enough to uncover all the corruption it is necessary for an efficiently functioning Democracy because too many of them will be focused on the same corruption from the same people because that corruption is what drives clicks.

Taylor Swift can’t save us (although writing ‘Taylor Swift can’t save us’ at the end of a piece as an excuse to use a photo of Taylor Swift will drive an extra few visitors! Thank you, T.S.)