I'm fairly tuned into news -- certainly less-so than in the past, but somehow I never even heard of The Messenger.
Whatever they were spending their money on, it certainly wasn't marketing.
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.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.
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?
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?
> 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.
So... No, sadly.