Messenger Implosion Shows Journalism Lead by Visionless, Fail-Upward Brunchlords | Hacker News Reader

Messenger Implosion Shows Journalism Lead by Visionless, Fail-Upward Brunchlords

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49 pointsrntn77 comments

I'm fairly tuned into news -- certainly less-so than in the past, but somehow I never even heard of The Messenger.

Same. Feels a lot like insider gossip that thought they had more going for themselves?

That said, "It’s a radical idea, but we could make meaningful progress if we clawed journalism from the hands of affluent, out of touch brunchlords, and put it back under the control of diverse, hungry journalists and editors who actually understand the news industry and media environment they work and exist in." is also a rather boring take? What do they want to make "meaningful progress" on? I certainly can't see "journalism for journalism's sake" as a good thing. Seems more likely you will get gatekeeping and another venue for activism?

In my opinion, "journalism for journalism's sake" would be what we call reporting the truth, or investigative journalism. Is there a national outlet that invests in pure investigative journalism anymore?

If you're looking for investigative journalism The Intercept isn't a bad read

That is the noble way to consider it, but as soon as something starts existing for its own sake, you start losing the reason the thing was enacted the first time.

I'd hazard the "pure" journalism you are seeing in your mind likely wasn't nearly as pure as you'd think it was. There is a reason a lot of very long lived scandals have always been the case. Even more true as you consider news crossing country boundaries. Any specific examples you have in mind?

>> What do they want to make "meaningful progress" on? I certainly can't see "journalism for journalism's sake" as a good thing. Seems more likely you will get gatekeeping and another venue for activism?

> In my opinion, "journalism for journalism's sake" would be what we call reporting the truth, or investigative journalism. Is there a national outlet that invests in pure investigative journalism anymore?

Investigative journalism can still amount to "gatekeeping and another venue for activism," if the investigative attention is selective and focused (more or less) to support one or more activist programs.

That's actually the most effective kind of manipulation, because it's simultaneously true and misleading.

And I also think that's close to what we've got. To really be "journalism for journalism's sake," I think you'd have to allocated investigative resources roughly equally among factions, with investigations focused on "pro-narrative" ideas and "counter-narrative" ideas.

The big stories used to be broken by local newspaper reporters. That process has been deliberately broken by private equity.

So... No, sadly.

Yep, I read the news every day, subscribe to several news outlets, keep up with the various issues going on, am even somewhat tangentially aware of the various meta-drama going on in journalism circles, and the shutdown announcement is the first I've ever heard of The Messenger.

Whatever they were spending their money on, it certainly wasn't marketing.

I would like some kind of tool that watches for new publications, maybe some objective ranking on popularity and subjective ranking on quality, and an associated graveyard that switches to archival links.

It also needs a slider, to see the historical version of a leaderboard on any given day. You can plug the redef and techmeme leaderboards into archive.org but it is all a little kludgy, with missing data.

https://redef.com/charts/sources/total

https://www.techmeme.com/lb

https://mediagazer.com/lb

https://www.memeorandum.com/lb

There is also

https://longform.org/archive/publications

https://www.aldaily.com/media/

There used to be https://www.newswhip.com/ which had a free section, Im not sure if it is gone or just burried. At one point Counterparties https://www.niemanlab.org/2011/09/felix-salmons-brain-drudge... which used https://percolate.com/ (now seismic) as a backend.

And then you have the world of blogger, medium, substack, ghost. Bloglovin was the site in that realm back in the day.

Journalists have switched purpose. They used to investigate the power and be the voice of the people. But the last few decades they investigate the people, and protect the power.

The few journalists that still exist have in many cases resorted to crowdfunding and personal blogs with difficult discoverability. And the mainstream tries to miscredit them by all means they can, such as the Trusted News Initiative (only listen to us), and fact-checking that many times are ridiculously false themselves.

It's a shame, but I understand why they're clawing to remain in power, people can't know the truth or form their own opinions based on facts. That would be dangerous. And when the facts can't be disputed there are only 2 options, bury or miscredit.

I love the title "brunchlord".

The only thing I like about it is that it makes it easy to know whether I should care about this person's opinion.

Sure enough, the blog post was completely deranged -- to the point that the author even tried to present it as a given that reporting on both sides of an issue is a bad thing. This moron is legitimately mad that modern journalism isn't propagandistic enough. Incredible.

The idea that issues have exactly two sides, and that all words that come out of anyone’s mouth should be treated exactly equally whether or not they make sense or have any backing evidence, is a bad thing. Journalism has to have a fact-checking, filtering, and prioritizing function, or else it’s just Twitter.

Not that anyone’s doing a good job of that right now, but it seems like that’s what the author is advocatig for.

From a business perspective the fatal flaw is that the customers don’t really want to read something close to the “truth”, they just want to hear their own preconceptions, or the deliberately uninformed statements of their favorite politician celebrities, repeated back.

It is kind of meaningful on its own but probably should be kept in context as much as possible before the concept has a chance to drift.

>scale-chasing incompetence by visionless brunchlords

There.

It may not be award-winning journalism but this is the kind of creativity that does stand out above the crowd.

Love me some techdirt, but this is off base in a few ways. For one thing NYTimes and Politico are both profitable. Whether they're good is up to interpretation, but I don't think the likes of techdirt can say they're failing.

They mention 404 Media in there as somebody who's doing it right. They're about to put up an email wall for their content because AI and monopolies and social media and tracking users will save them.[1]

But one thing this article has for it that I haven't found in most other reading is an attempt at a solution. I mean at least it links to a discussion about it.[2] I'm only half-way through it, and so far it's a radical approach. Given the gutting of journalism I believe a radical change is what we need.

[1] https://www.404media.co/why-404-media-needs-your-email-addre...

[2] https://lpeproject.org/blog/taking-media-out-of-the-market/

I just want to add that folks like Cloudflare directly engage in the "non-reformist reform" that my second linked article talks about. Their Project Galileo[1] is a cool example of infrastructural support of journalism (and nonprofits) that can make all the difference.

[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/galileo/

Almost as if a for-profit model isn’t a great fit for journalism… especially on the internet.

The for profit model of journalism has been the dominant form for over 100 years. During the majority of that time it flourished. Only in the last 25 years has it collapsed. I’d say your view probably needs some updating.

But it collapsed for reasons that can't be reversed or maneuvered around. For all the talk about the more esoteric reasons for journalism's problems like partisan polarization or Big Tech— which aren't wrong but are mostly higher-order correction terms— the fundamental problem is much more simple: most journalism was paid for by things other than reader revenue. Classified ads, movie showtimes, and a whole bunch of other revenue streams were actually what propped up newspapers; these were all obliterated by the Internet and they won't ever return.

At no point in history has journalism ever survived on subscription revenue alone, there was merely an anomalous period where it didn't need to because there were enough sources of supplemental revenue. But now that period is over, and so we have to think about a business model that can survive given the reality of "subscription revenue is not enough and can never be enough".

> At no point in history has journalism ever survived on subscription revenue alone

Aren't there quite a few journos that are thriving via substack, which is, to my knowledge, purely subscription based?

There are quite a few opinion columnists thriving on Substack. I think there are few, if any, journalists doing boots-on-the-ground reporting thriving there.

It was a fluke that it worked so well for so long.

Over 100 years is a fluke? Nothing about it feels unlikely, lucky, or by chance.

fluke - noun - an unlikely chance occurrence, especially a surprising piece of luck. Ex: "their triumph was no fluke"

The etymology of that sense of "fluke" is from the game of billiards. It's when you make a successful stroke by accident.

And yes it was a lucky stroke for journalism that the same newspapers that carried their words happened to carry lucrative ad space and sports box scores that were hard to get elsewhere.

Classified ad revenue carried a lot of newspapers because for a long time there was really nothing else like it. That was lucky. It wasn't anything particular to the news; but a lack of other options. Now there are other options.

How do you suggest we pay journalist? They certainty shouldn't work for free.

Non-profit organisations. Large and small foundations and charities. This is not a solution, I don’t know how to get there, but I think it would get better results.

E.g. Pro Publica. It gets pretty good results, for its niche (investigative journalism, focused primarily on institutional corruption).

Either form journalist orgs as non-profits (e.g NPR) or modernize journalism content (e.g Morning Brew). The traditional print news model is getting increasingly out of date and it's going to take a bunch of old geezers dying to modernize journalism. It's still "content", and news outlets need to keep up with changing consumer tastes.

What do you mean by modernize? Is being funded by ads modernizing in your eyes because that is how Morning Brew makes their money. If that's how you look at it then you'll be happy to know that many publications are very modern and write sponsored content filled with modern ads.

Morning Brew gets good sponsorships because of their modern content. Modern content is making video, appealing to a target demographic (Gen Z for them), and being active on social media. Many newspapers don't care enough about social media to realize if they make social media oriented content, they would get sponsorships on those platforms.

I used to work at a large regional newspaper, and they could not understand how social content works. They never made short form content, they refused to make a TikTok or post on Instagram reels or YouTube.

Newspapers have always been supplemented in some way by advertising, but the old people in charge seem to think you can throw some banner ads on your website and call it a day. Sponsorships are a lot different than banner ads.

Thus, you get a bunch of old people reading articles on websites, while the younger people are all on social media. Newspapers also don't understand you can use social content as a way to promote your full newspaper subscription.

The place I worked at was a bunch of people who worked there for 30 years doing the exact same thing as they did on day 1. No desire to appeal to younger people, no desire to compete on social media. Probably because of their arrogance in thinking video or social media is below them and not "real" journalism.

Regional newspapers also by definition have a geographically restricted market. That worked well when there were geographical restrictions to distribution (printing and delivering newspapers), but less well in our modern age. NYT et al have found success by appealing to pivoting to larger national and international audiences.

Taxes -> Libraries -> Grants

Bundles (Apple One, Microsoft 365) -> Apple News, MSN Pro

Feedly -> Publishers -> Authors

The problem with paying for journalism, is you have to pay ahead of time to consume an unknown. To do that you either need trust, or institutions collecting a little from everyone and making decisions where to allocate funds.

> It’s a radical idea, but we could make meaningful progress if we clawed journalism from the hands of affluent, out of touch brunchlords, and put it back under the control of diverse, hungry journalists and editors who actually understand the news industry and media environment they work and exist in.

No, probably not.

As a fellow cynic I am sympathetic, but I kind of both agree and disagree with this. I disagree in that meaningful progress is probably possible, but agree in that that meaningful progress is unlikely to be anything remotely near an optimal path.

If you are aiming at the wrong target, and don't know it, you are screwed.

Examples in there of employee healthcare woes... sure with we just had universal healthcare.

>sure with we just had universal healthcare.

I dropped out of medical school over a decade ago, so my opinion is absolutely jaded. Talking with graduate physicians, the general concensus is "universal healthcare will never happen in the US." So my suggestion to unencumbered youngins is to study/travel abroad, and begin your expatriation quest... OR: become an attorney (joke: "in the US, for a cancer diagnosis, the best outcome is to be a lawyer").

Talking with so and so, the general consensus is that women will never get credit, black folks will never vote, etc etc

Better to just give up ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

>Better to just give up ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yes, but if you're looking for "easier lifepath for average joe" then, like Southern Blacks of early 20th Century... you'd have an easier life if you just moved north.

You're not wrong, but not everybody has "the fight" within. I know I don't.

Its more likely to happen in Caifornia than anywhere else imo. Medi cal would just need to be expanded and thats it. The framework already exists and about 30% of the state is already on it.

That "just" is doing a lot of work there. California had a $38 billion budget deficit last year and a $68 billion deficit the year before. I would like universal healthcare as much as or more than anyone, but without fiscal transfers at the Federal level I don't think it is possible - states cannot run permanent debts the way the Federal government can.

And in the year before there was a 100 billion dollar windfall in the budget during a pandemic no less while still hosting this healthcare program. State spending is a good thing, it really amounts to making investments into either the infrastructure of the state or its people. Its too bad headlines and therefore sentiment seem to miss this fact, and equate a spendy state to a ditzy college student with terrible credit card habits.

I wish California well, but: any sort of attempts to implement massive healthcare changes state-wide (e.g. to single-payer, access to all), will immediately be thwarted by US intrastate immigrants, in addition to international border pressures.

>in the year before there was a 100 billion dollar windfall

I am not sure of California's particulars, but some government profitabilities are largely on account of Pandemic Funding 2020-2022 (e.g. my local county hosptial for ~1M people would not have turned-profit w/out CoVid fund$).

Even if it weren't universal, having it not be tied to your employer would be a start.

Without citation, I believe that 50%+ of US healthcare is already paid for by a government agency (whether veteran, indigency, etc).

...might as well unlink it to employers for the minority =/

Getting laid off doesn't end health insurance, it's ironically bad journalism that they included that misleading question, from an apparently uninformed person.

The typical flow would be: current insurance continues unaltered for the rest of the month. Following month you're automatically covered under same policy through COBRA provisions even if you take no action. (Obviously some employers would include multiple months of employer-paid coverage, but this example is a worst-case scenario if they don't give any additional coverage in severance).

Somewhere in the 60 days following getting laid off, you need to decide between A) sign up to continue your existing insurance plan through COBRA B) sign up for a new insurance plan through healthcare.gov (subsidized if low income) or C) sign up on your spouse's plan if applicable.

It's a hassle, but you have a couple months to figure out what's best for you, and you can continue any ongoing things without interruption.

A) COBRA doesn't apply if the company is out of business and is often prohibitively expensive anyway. B) Try living in a state that's hostile to "Obamacare" C) Not everyone is married.

>He can’t see the inherent class, race and gender biases in most newsrooms, the steady erosion of trust caused by feckless “both sides” reporting, the underlying flaws with the engagement-baiting advertising models that can violently derail efforts to genuinely inform the public, or the way well-funded authoritarian propagandists exploit these failures for messaging and recruitment traction.

>He’s not alone; recall when Semafor decided to launch a “trust in news” symposium by hosting right wing propagandist Tucker Carlson, then bristled at the idea this wasn’t helping? As the NYT op-ed section ably demonstrates on a daily basis, a growing number of outlets are primarily interested in culture war engagement bait disguised as intellectualism. Mindless engagement is king.

This is a whole article wherein the cancer is performing the autopsy.

No one has any great theories on what to do about info overload. So it's going to suck until someone comes up with something new.

The original Circa had a great approach to this IMO. They chunked up news into smaller pieces of information, and gave you a way to indicate interest in receiving follow-up notifications about a given story.

I feel like ex-Buzzfeed-guy Ben Smith’s Semafor is trying riffs on that theme in a couple of ways. In their big reported pieces they seem to like to packaging together mixed forms of reporting, coupling straight-reported factual summaries with editorial “views,” prognostications, other organizations’ reporting, and forward-looking timelines.

The effect is pleasantly like the sort of dense, brief topic subscriptions you mention, in a weirdly retrospective kind of sense. The best way I can think to describe the effect is that it feels like having subscribed to the story’s notifications a year or two ago, before I knew I’d be interested in it.

They use a similar technique in their “Signals” products. I’m not sure how they’d describe those, but they seem aimed less at hard reporting and more at delivering context and background by threading together paragraph-sized summaries of mainly other institutions’ reporting.

Circa was definitely ahead of its time, and never quite replaced.

The anti twitter/reddit/facebook. And also an anthesis to something like wikinews.

The powers that be need to revisit the idea of organizing information in a way that stories get appended and built upon, instead of each new piece of information being a new post in an endless firehose.

They had an editor, Anthony DeRosa, who took the time to make sure what they were reporting was accurate before pushing publish. In an era where 'first' dominates, it was refreshing -- but maybe not popular.

Why is it a given that "managerial incompetence" is what caused the demise of The Messenger? Maybe the vision was just wrong. Maybe the journos never produced any compelling content.

And when the author writes things like

> The idea that the affluent out of touch gentleman behind The Hill — itself a longstanding purveyor of clickbait and timid “both sides” journalism — was going to single-handedly change modern reporting was always laughable.

Then why should I feel sorry for the staffers that took the job, who now need to find another job?

And, finally, while I'm sure Finkelstein will be okay financially, I have a hard time seeing how him burning $50M of his stash as "failing upwards". What opportunities are now available to Finkelstein since The Messenger died, that weren't there before?

> millionaire or billionaire media owners who don’t want to offend sources, advertisers, or event sponsors with bold, truth-telling journalism that has actual teeth

how about:

"People with responsibility for profit and loss who stupidly chase a business model that can't possibly work, when there was already ample proof that it wouldn't."

> bold, truth-telling journalism that has actual teeth

http://www.ifstone.org/index.php

sometimes that does come along. Usually you have to go looking for it, and no one's making much money from it.

Absorbing the content produced by generalist American corporate news outlets will leave you with a highly biased and inaccurate view of the world you live in and is thus best avoided entirely. Also, there's few people as insufferable as those who religiously read the NYT, WaPo, WSJ, etc. and thus consider themselves 'well-informed'. The confidently brainwashed intelligentsia is a sight to behold.

Specialist outlets of various sorts (energy news, etc.) are the place to look if you want decent information that's reliable, but these are often run on a subscription model, at least for a good fraction of their content. If you want a more in-depth picture, you may have to read a book, or better, several books, as book authors often disagree about what's important or have their own ideological agenda.

In the case of weather, emergencies, disasters, etc. (where you need reliable information in a hurry), it's better to have direct links to the local weather and emergency sites than to rely on a news outlet interlocutor.

The title should say "led", not "lead".

Kissinger's death was where I really started detaching myself from news media entirely. It was extremely hard to find an article or video that didn't say the exact same thing in almost identical wording: "was kissinger a war criminal? well he was certainly controversial but his influence stood large". No, objectively, he was a war criminal. Bombing Cambodia and several other actions were, factually, legally, war crimes. There's no way to two sides it.

Even though I'd firmly disagree with it, I'd much rather read an article that says "yeah, he was a war criminal, but war crimes are okay when America does them because America good." Instead you get this washed out nothingness where we as a society can't reflect on anything.

It Reminds me of the scene in the Big Short where they're trying to convince the reporter to run the story on the obvious pump And dump, and the guys like "hey I've got a family to feed."

I think it’s hard for an obituary to definitely call someone a war criminal when he was never tried, much less convicted, of a war crime. That’s not to say he shouldn’t have been or his actions don’t qualify, but an obituary is supposed to be somewhat neutral and not an opinion piece, and the facts are that he’s been labeled (perhaps fairly) a war criminal by many, but never actually convicted.

Agreed. For a comparison, the BBC obituary on Bin Laden, whom a lot of people would happily condemn without reservation as a terrorist, shows the same kind of detached neutrality. The second mention is "Saudi-born dissident".

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-10741005

We can thank the United States non-participation in the Rome Statute and the International Criminal Court for that. Since they can't convict us of war crimes, by default no American can be a war criminal.

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck but refuses to accept that it's a duck...it's still a duck.

The US isn't a part of the war crimes part of the ICC, therefore no US citizen will ever be tried there. Thus, by your logic, there can be no US war criminals.

I think the actual nuance here is that, in the words of the West Wing, all war is a crime. Sometimes the term "war criminal" is used fairly, other times it's trotted out to try and tar people/movements. The US knows this and does it, which is why it doesn't submit to the circus. I'm not excusing the horrible stuff the US has done, but I think I agree that humanity hasn't gotten to the point where we can really fairly avoid or judge war crimes.

Were you following the news during the "War on Terror"/"War in Iraq" era? Because the Kissinger coverage, while infuriating, pales in comparison to the horse shit the media was uncritically publishing in the early 2000s. The story that sticks out in my mind the most is the Tora Bora mountain fortress/lair[1], but there are plenty of others. Many of those responsible for this crap failed upwards[2].

[1] https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/tora-bora-tunnel-kin...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Frum

Or the 3d visualization of a very similar complex supposedly under a hospital in gaza, that a major US newspaper ran just a few months ago. The exact same institutions are doing the exact same things now.

The US propaganda regime is like a champagne tower. The most self-serving but still superficial plausible narrative is the top glass. Most people are caught here. If you reject this, you will be presented with a choice between several semi-mainstream counterculture narratives some of which are closer to the truth and some of which are more obviously false. If you reject all of those, you will get another set, all of which are more “fringe” and some of which are more obviously false but some of them will be even closer to the truth. If you pick an option that is even more of a lie than the mainstream you become a conspiracy theorist. If you pick the option closest to the truth at every level and discover how even that is a lie, moving on the more fringe level below, you will eventually find yourself with the whole truth, which is indeed quite fringe.

Had 50 million dollars but I,,, spent it all...

All journalism is local.

LOL @ "Brunchlords"

What a callous article. It seems the author is angry that a bunch of people came together to fund a company that failed in the end...well, most startups fail anyway.

> Such journalism is a direct reflection of millionaire or billionaire media owners who don’t want to offend sources, advertisers, or event sponsors with bold, truth-telling journalism that has actual teeth. So what you get instead is a sort of journalism simulacrum that fails to critique wealth, corruption, or power with any real consistency, since the wealthy and powerful owners very obviously don’t want that.

If you want to start an activist site, go start one and solicit donations from your rage-baited audience (that's what Techdirt is afterall). The Messenger didn't claim and never wanted to be an investigative news outlet. It was a simple news outlet that churned out everyday news without giving opinions..I actually loved it!

The sheer arrogance of some journalists...and they wonder why their industry is on a massive decline.

Pretty sure journalism is not on a decline due to arrogance.

If arrogance is a prime factor in the decline of an industry I think all of us could name plenty of industries that should be subterranean by now.

These people took glee in demonizing and dehumanizing half of the country under the guise they're on the wrong side of history. Except what actually happened is the pendulum has swung in the other direction completely repudiating credibility of these organizations, and the people that were dehumanized are understandably very mad.

These alleged journalists are supposed to report on the the world and events around them, except they refuse to see what's in front of them because it's inconvenient to their failed idealogical positions.

Absolutely, it is great that the article writer is no longer employed as a journalist

Having not heard about the Messenger before today, I'm not sure what ideological position you're talking about. Can you elaborate?

It's a-little-ambiguously-coded pro-MAGA how dare people hate the right, the right will have its revenge bit. It doesn't really talk to The Messenger.

Sort of, but also I disagree with you, even centrists saw how dehumanizing and hateful the corporate media became over the last few years and it has turned open-minded people against them.

I agree that this is what OP is saying. But it's funny that that didn't actually happen? All I saw was mainstream media outlets continuously chiding their own readers for not being sufficiently empathetic to poor, white, Trump voters.

You'll notice and remember what annoys you. The articles confirming your world view aren't noteworthy. I'm curious what media you consume. I stumpled on an opinion piece just the other day with "red flags to identify a Republican", I may be biased but it seems those kinds of pieces are always from one side of the political spectrum.

Likewise I've never seen "if you vote for democrats swipe left" on Tinder, but the opposite is extremely common.

It's talking to the author of the article, who rather ludicrously diagnosed the problem with the Messenger as it being not biased and ideological enough.

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