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News Startup The Messenger Is Shutting Down Effective Immediately Less Than a Year After Launch — Which Was News to Its Staffers
The Messenger is shutting its doors eight months after the digital news site launched, with the startup having burned through $50 million in funding.
“All I know is that if I were to launch a media start-up I’d be sure to rent an entire floor of a downtown Manhattan skyscraper that was 9/10ths empty all day … and then fail to tell my employees they were laid off until they read about it in the New York Times,” Jordan Hoffman, a senior writer and critic at The Messenger, wrote in a post on X(formerly Twitter). It was founded by Jimmy Finkelstein, a publishing veteran who was previously a former part owner of the Hollywood Reporter (now owned by PMC, parent of Variety) and The Hill (sold to Nexstar Media Group in 2021). The Messenger started with an incredibly important mission – to deliver balanced and accurate journalism at a time when Americans’ trust in media is at a record low – and I am proud of what we achieved.
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