The sudden shutdown of Jimmy Finkelstein’s The Messenger on Wednesday – eight months and more than $50 million after its launch — was the latest distress signal from the world of digital news media, where the business model of traffic-for-advertising has proved to be unsustainable.
Despite the failures of BuzzFeed and Vice among others in 2023, Finkelstein still spent profusely to launch a start-up he was convinced could buck the trend. He offered salaries that were two and three times market rate for journalists in order to fill a newsroom that could make an instant impact on the marketplace, offering supposedly apolitical news to a nation that was already consuming its news on TikTok.