Editor at The Messenger Quits After Site’s First Week Amid Internal Strife

News start-up The Messenger is losing one of its politics editors just a week after going live, amid apparent internal turmoil and criticism from other media outlets.

The New York Times reported on Saturday that the wildly ambitious venture is experiencing conflicts and tensions are flaring among the staff, which includes a large number experienced journalists previously with other major publications.

In that environment, politics editor Gregg Birnbaum, formerly of CNN and The Miami Herald, clashed with Neetzan Zimmerman, the site’s Chief Growth Officer, who was hired to guide the company to its astonishingly aggressive traffic targets. Those targets have resulted in a whirlwind of a launch that saw duplicate stories and invited mockery for click-focused headlines alongside a debut Trump interview that was widely panned as softball.

Journalists have chafed at demands to mass-produce articles based on competitors’ stories. Senior editors huddled with staff on Thursday to address criticism of the site, which had come from Columbia Journalism Review, Harvard’s Nieman Lab and The Wrap, a Hollywood trade publication. And a politics editor quit on Friday after a clash with the company’s audience chief.

Part of the reason for the ongoing critiques that have flooded journo Twitter and, at least according to the NYT, the Messenger’s newsroom, is the company’s “blitzkrieg approach.” The pace and posture have generated sometimes brutal criticism from other outlets.

“Those tensions reached a boiling point earlier in the week after one of The Messenger’s news teams assigned a story that had already been assigned by an editor on another team,” writes Benjamin Mullin. “Mr. Zimmerman admonished editors in a group chat on the messaging platform Slack that they needed to use an online form to coordinate their story assignments. That guidance ran afoul of editors who preferred to use Slack for story planning.”

It turned into a Slack battle that Mullin was able to review, resulting in Birnbaum quitting.

After a back-and-forth between Mr. Zimmerman and a politics editor, Gregg Birnbaum, in which Mr. Zimmerman at one point wrote that it was “quite simple to open the doc and check,” and at another point blamed the politics team for the mixed signals, Mr. Birnbaum said he had had enough.

“Wow, how condescending is this?” Mr. Birnbaum wrote, according to a copy of his message reviewed by The New York Times. “Thanks for the lecture.” He quit on the spot and advised Mr. Zimmerman to find another politics editor who “doesn’t know what they’re doing so you can tell them what to do.”

Birnbaum in an email to the times zeroed in on the pursuit of traffic above all as the cause of friction in the organization and from the outside.

“Who doesn’t like traffic to their news site?” he said in an email. “But the rapacious and blind desperate chasing of traffic — by the nonstop gerbil wheel rewriting story after story that has first appeared in other media outlets in the hope that something, anything, will go viral — has been a shock to the system and a disappointment to many of the outstanding quality journalists at The Messenger who are trying to focus on meaningful original and distinctive reporting.”

It’s not just the pace of demand or the focus on aggregation, but the churning out of low news value content that has resulted in some of the harshest criticisms of the breakneck first week. But in the fisking there is also derision for the company’s claimed goals of “balanced” and “unbiased” coverage, and many other media highlight the company’s funding coming from right-leaning sources. NiemanLab in particular took issue, somewhat ironically, with The Messenger’s implied criticism of other, existing press and media outlets.

Jimmy Finkelstein, founder of The Messenger, was previously part-owner of The Hill and ran The Hollywood Reporter.

The company said in a statement to the New York Times it still in early stages and testing.

“We have delivered hundreds of pieces of great journalism and have exceeded our traffic goals,” the statement said. “Our teams are successfully working through any initial issues with technology and work flow, and we are confident that these will be resolved when we fully launch next month with our verticals and advertisers.”

Editor-in-chief Dan Wakeford has also reassured employees that such growing pains should not necessarily be seen as an indicator of the future. His comments and more are in the New York Times‘ report here.

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