Friday 2nd February: The Messenger to close after less than a year

TGIF! Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Chris. Hope you’ve got fun weekend plans!

Just look at that subheading in the box above. The Messenger shuttering isn’t exactly a shock — everyone I’ve spoken to about it has been negative about it since its launch — but a number of the details about its closure are. Briefly, the site’s founder Jimmy Finkelstein sent an email around to its staff announcing that The Messenger’s shutdown was “effective immediately.”

As this post from a former senior writer for the site makes clear, The Messenger’s management implemented daft and counterproductive strategies right from the off. Surprise surprise, when the site inevitably folded under the weight of its mismanagement, it was not those managers who ended up bearing the worst of the fallout.

When the news broke the Media Voices WhatsApp chat was on fire, not with surprise that the general news site was shuttering, but with alarm about how its closure was being covered. Let’s be clear — there is space for digital-first general news sites, both legacy and new. What went wrong here was a failure of leadership right from the start and a lack of a clear identity.

Wrote this for my Substack — and it’s happily a crossover between my two great loves of media and gaming. We’ve written about the value of games to publishers before, and in light of the NYT releasing some more stats about the importance of Wordle etc. to its business model I thought it was a good opportunity to take a look at newsgames in general. TL;DR I don’t think they’re living up to their full potential, but deserve celebration nonetheless.

Here’s an interesting and timely follow-up to our main story. I’m sure Brian was working on this — even if it was just idly thinking about how to illustrate his point — from before The Messenger news broke, but it’s wonderfully relevant anyway. In this post for The Rebooting, he explains that while faking audiences is standard operating procedure’, it cannot be the entirety of your business plan.

For those of you thinking ‘this story isn’t about media business models’ — you couldn’t be more wrong. Media business success is predicated on serving the public, and there’s no more important time to do that than when interviewing grieving families. I’ve heard people defend the ‘death knock’ before — always unsuccessfully and shamefacedly — but this presents a practical guide to ensuring families are ready to talk to the media. Great listen.

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