I'll acknowledge that no one's ever heard of me or this site either, but at least I didn't spend $50 million to achieve that obscurity
/The Messenger will shut down less than a year after launching news site: ‘One of the biggest busts of all time’
And I won’t be laying off 300 people, either. Even better, I probably made fifty bucks off this site last year after expenses, which puts me $50,000,050 ahead of this fool.
Money-bleeding start-up The Messenger — the news site that launched to great fanfare last May — was expected to shut down Wednesday, according to a source close to the situation.
“The site will go dark,” an insider at the publication told The Post, adding that none of the roughly 300 staffers will get severance.
Co-founder and CEO Jimmy Finkelstein, who launched the site in May after raising $50 million, had been scrambling to secure funding this week as employees braced to hear whether the company would avert disaster, as The Post previously reported.
A rep for the Messenger did not comment.
“This will go down as one of the biggest busts of all time,” a media expert said. “The Messenger will be remembered as the Titanic of publishing disasters.”
Finkelstein had big dreams of turning the Messenger into a major centrist news outlet that would include hiring around 550 journalists within a year and compete with the likes of The Los Angeles Times.
He paid top dollar to lure away talent from major publications, including The Post, Politico and NBC News.
“What ultimately killed The Messenger was lack of message — and arrogance,” the media industry expert said. “Hundreds of people left great jobs with the promise of creating something better — which turned out to be a big lie.”
I found this story interesting because, like most of the commenters on the Post’s site, I’d never heard of the publication; or for that matter, Jimmy Finkelstein (I looked him up: he’s the brother of NYC’s dreadful Andy Stein, which I guess doesn’t surprise me). I may not know how many Kardashians there are, or what they’re up to, but I have a fairly developed awareness of what’s going on in the political and media worlds, and yet I've heard of the Messenger, never seen a link to it, or even read about it. Obviously, I wasn’t alone in my unawareness — millions were with me in that dark pool of ignorance — so I wonder what he did with all that money while he was creating the best-kept secret in publishing?