Tensions flare up in The Messenger, a fledgling news site

Executives at The Messenger, a new start-up, had big ambitions in the months leading up to its public debut. They said they would start with 175 journalists covering entertainment and politics, change journalism for the better, and even make the public “fall in love” with the media again.

But less than a week after the start, tensions are running high.

Journalists were annoyed by the demands to mass-produce articles based on competitors’ stories. Senior editors sat down with staff Thursday to criticize the site, which emanated from Columbia Journalism ReviewHarvards Nieman lab And The cover, a Hollywood trade publication. And a political editor quit on Friday after a clash with the company’s public chief.

Much of the tension at The Messenger and critical coverage on the site stems from the company’s blitzkrieg approach to digital publishing. The company told The Times earlier this year that it aims to eventually reach 100 million readers per month — making it one of the most widely read publications in the United States — and has hired Neetzan Zimmerman, a well-known digital traffic maven, to drive that aggressive campaign. target by publishing dozens of stories per day.

“The Messenger has the feel of a publication that came about quickly,” said Ken Doctor, a media analyst and founder of Lookout Local, a news company.

In a statement, The Messenger says that the site is still in an early testing phase.

“We delivered hundreds of great pieces of journalism and exceeded our traffic targets,” the statement said. “Our teams are successfully working on any initial technology and workflow issues, and we are confident that they will be resolved when we launch fully next month with our verticals and advertisers.”

Founded by Jimmy Finkelstein, former co-owner of The Hill and The Hollywood Reporter, The Messenger has raised $50 million from investors including Josh Harris, co-founder of private equity giant Apollo. It moved quickly in the months leading up to its debut, hiring dozens of journalists, some from major publications like Politico and CNN, and some lured by salaries well above the standard market rate, according to two people with knowledge of the recruiting efforts of the company.

The site has multiple teams dedicated to breaking news, which has led to confusion over who is working on what, according to five people familiar with the inner workings of the site who spoke on condition of anonymity because company rules prevented unauthorized interviews with the preventing media. Over the past week, The Messenger sometimes published two versions of the same story, with the editors unaware of what their colleagues were working on.

Those tensions reached a boiling point earlier in the week after one of The Messenger’s news teams assigned a story that had already been assigned by an editor from another team. Mr Zimmerman warned editors in a group chat on the messaging platform Slack that they should use an online form to coordinate their story assignments. That guidance met with editors who preferred to use Slack for story planning.

After a back-and-forth between Mr. Zimmerman and a political editor, Gregg Birnbaum, in which Mr. Zimmerman wrote at one point that it was “quite easy to open and check the document,” and at another point the political team for the mixed signals, Mr. Birnbaum said he had had enough.

“Wow, how condescending is this?” Mr. Birnbaum wrote, according to a copy of his post reviewed by The New York Times. “Thanks for the reading.” He stopped on the spot and advised Mr. Zimmerman to find another political editor who “don’t know what they’re doing, so you can tell them what to do.”

In an interview, Mr. Birnbaum, who has previously worked at CNN, NBC News and The Miami Herald, confirmed that he wrote the Slack post.

“Who doesn’t like traffic to their news site?” he said in an email. “But the predatory and blind desperate pursuit of traffic – through the non-stop gerbil wheel rewriting story after story first published in other media in the hope that something, anything, will go viral – is a shock to the system and been a disappointment. to many of the excellent quality journalists at The Messenger who try to focus on meaningful, original and distinctive reporting.”

Editors met earlier this week to discuss concerns about how the company is publishing at high volumes. The five journalists who spoke on condition of anonymity said they had grown frustrated with the company’s practice of assigning rewrites of competitor stories, a practice called out by media critics after the site debuted.

Dan Wakeford, The Messenger’s editor-in-chief, assured staff at the meetings that it would take months for The Messenger to build credibility and that two out of five people said they were “taking things out of context”. The company landed an interview with former President Donald J. Trump and was the first to report Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ plan to aggressively campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in Iowa.

While The Messenger has hired some 150 journalists — falling short of its initial goal — the company is still on track to meet its initial traffic targets, the two people said. A copy of The Messenger’s internal traffic dashboard from Friday, reviewed by The Times, shows the company had surpassed nearly 100,000 unique visitors for the day. A person familiar with the company’s recruiting efforts said the company was on track to reach its goal of 175 employees within weeks.

According to one of five people familiar with the inner workings of the company, Messenger expects traffic to grow in the coming weeks as it rises through Google’s search ranking algorithm. The company’s emphasis on clicks is reflected in the company’s ‘playbook’ for employees, which was reviewed by The Times. Employees, the script says, should ask themselves three questions before writing a story.

“Shall I click on this?” the guidelines say, according to the copy. “Would I read it all the way through? Would I share it?”