A song to read by: “Mood Ring,” by Dehd

What I’m reading: “Lucky Jim,” by Kingsley Amis

Published this week

— Boardroom Pins Its Profitability to a Star-Studded Experiential Strategy

— Adweek Podcast: The Economist Is Painting This Town ‘Read’ and Making a Mark on the US

— Why Publishers Are Cutting Their D.C. Bureaus in an Election Year

— TechCrunch Ends Its Subscription Product Amid Staff Layoffs

On my mind

The biggest media story of the last week was the highly visible implosion of the startup news publisher The Messenger, which launched not even one year ago with outsized ambitions and very few realistic means of achieving them.

Its demise, which Dylan Byers at Puck called both “foreseeable and foreseen,” was a slow-motion train wreck that cost nearly 300 journalists their jobs and gave institutional investors even more reason to be wary of working with the media industry. 

Ben Mullin at The New York Times officially broke the news of its shuttering, but blood had been in the water for weeks as its founder, Jimmy Finklestein, had been openly scrambling to raise a second round of funding to keep the doomed venture on life support.

But despite the plenitude of think pieces written about the collapse of The Messenger, none have touched on its relationship to Grid, a separate news publisher that was absorbed by The Messenger in an acquisition in March 2023.

Grid, which launched in January 2022, had a refreshingly unorthodox editorial mission. 

The 30-person outlet sought to cover the news using a series of intersecting perspectives, which aimed to make clear to readers how a single story could read differently based on how you approached it. For instance, a piece about Covid-19 could also touch on its effect on the global supply chain. It debuted a wholly original editorial concept, a format called a 360, with the express purpose of making these connections evident. (I would link to an example, but for reasons that will become clear later on, I cannot.)

It was started by veteran journalists Laura McGann and Mark Bauman, who raised around $10 million from International Media Investments (IMI) and a wealthy tech entrepreneur. 

McGann, who came from Vox, built and led the Grid newsroom, where she championed collaboration above all else. The more reporters working on a story, the better. She told me she was inspired to pursue this format based on her experiences of working alongside reporters in moments of crisis or breaking news events, when the standard silos that divide newsrooms are temporarily dissolved in a moment of all-hands-on-deck camaraderie.

McGann built out a talented team of journalists who bought into this novel editorial mission, which was no small feat. Getting great journalists to leave their jobs to gamble on a completely untested concept is difficult, and it speaks to the appeal of the approach that McGann was able to attract so many great ones. 

During its heyday, Grid produced some really great reporting, including several great stories about the Canadian trucker protests (remember those?), a great example of a news event that crisscrossed the beats of politics, economics, misinformation and data privacy.

Adweek even named McGann its Media Editor of the Year in 2022, and I had the opportunity to profile her.

But by March 2023 — just over a year after launching — Grid was shut down. Reports at the time said that it was being “subsumed into a forthcoming news media company,” which turned out to be The Messenger. 

As I understand it, the investment firm IMI invested in both Grid and The Messenger, and for some reason the group changed its mind about Grid one year into the experiment, folded it into The Messenger and put all its chips on the combined company. 

Grid staff were offered jobs at The Messenger, and many of them took the work, knowing full well that The Messenger would be completely unlike what they had initially signed up for. Still, it was that or unemployment.

Now, one year after that merger, we all know what happened. The Messenger folded, shutting down its entire website. Not one piece of work remains. All the Grid staff who held their noses and joined The Messenger now have stints at two successive failed media companies haunting their resumes forever and not a single clip to show for it. 

What is perhaps the most frustrating, however, is how clearly this episode reflects many of the worst characteristics of the industry.

Investors and talking heads constantly bemoan the lack of innovation in the news space, saying publishers cannot expect to succeed with outdated strategies. 

Grid, which brought to life a genuinely novel concept, one that championed cross-department collaboration, deeply reported coverage and nuance, answered that call. And what was its reward? Barely one year of operations before its investors threw in the towel.

And, instructively, what do these investors throw their chips behind after giving up on Grid? A news publisher whose antiquated editorial and commercial strategies were so clearly doomed that coverage of The Messenger, from the literal very first day of its launch, predicted its demise. 

In my time covering the media industry, I have never seen coverage of a startup be so universally assured of its foolishness. Nobody with any expertise on the subject gave it even a lick of a chance.

I like a lot of the points that Jack Schafer at Politico makes about The Messenger; I, too, wanted it to work. In the first year of existence, a new company should be given the leeway to make adjustments and find its footing. 

But The Messenger was a long shot, a categorically poor use of funding. And the fact that it got a chance at the expense of Grid, which could far more feasibly have flourished, is frustrating and incriminating. Not only was The Messenger a waste of its capital — it was also a waste of Grid. 

More broadly, it speaks to an investment thesis that is hypocritical at best and cowardly at worst. Ultimately the powers that be behind these two companies chose a known strategy, riddled with obvious flaws, over an unknown strategy full of promise. 

It should also be said that they chose a venture led by conservative, problematic white men, one of whom was born on third base, over two experienced journalists, one of whom was one of only a handful of women at the helm of a major news operation.

The message, as it were, that this sends to the industry writ large is that innovation is welcome in name only. New concepts, led by new leadership with novel strategies for fixing persistent issues will be championed until the going gets rough. Then they will be canned, and we as an industry will just go back to trying the same old things to fix the same old problems and get the same old results.

The week that was

Another insane week! I have a vacation planned at the end of the month and am already counting down the days.

In short, on Tuesday I went to an event at ​​NeueHouse Madison Square with my colleague Christine Lane, which was hosted by The Guardian in celebration of its health and wellness vertical, called Well Actually. 

There, I met up with several of my favorite Guardian staff, including Max Benwell, who has been instrumental in the launch of a newsletter called Reclaim Your Brain, a capsule product part of Well Actually intended to help readers recalibrate their relationship to their phones. Max told me Reclaim Your Brain is the fastest-growing newsletter The Guardian has ever launched, skyrocketing up to around 70,000 (or so) subscribers in just a few weeks. 

I also spoke with Caroline Phinney, who runs newsletters at The Guardian, Luis Romero, who runs U.S. ad sales and Steve Sachs, who runs its U.S. business. I also chatted briefly with Sarah Bishop Woods, the chief of staff for the News Revenue Hub, who I think I accidentally annoyed but whose company has a mission I greatly admire.

In between all the yapping, we were served various wellness-adjacent food and drink, including a terrible non-alcoholic margarita, a delicious alcoholic margarita and some chocolates with crickets involved, which are splendid and need to stop being treated like a gimmick! But that is a topic for another newsletter.

On Wednesday, it was a similarly buzzy day. I met with Neil Vogel and Jon Roberts at the Dotdash Meredith headquarters, and the two might be the last remaining optimists in the industry, providing a dose of good spirit sorely needed amid a grim week. (Outside of The Messenger, there were a battery of other layoffs, including at The Wall Street Journal.)

After that I jetted off quickly to the Nasdaq headquarters, where Minute Media was toasting its acquisition of STN Video, which cost around $150 million, per Sara Fischer. There I ran into Rich Routman from The Sporting News, an innovative sports media company, as well as an old friend I had not seen in years, the photographer Jackson Krule.

I also chatted briefly with Minute Media CMO Andres Cardenas, who told me that the company celebrated its launch in 2011 with a boat ride around the Statue of Liberty. Launches have changed a lot since then!

Afterward I hopped over to the MOMA, which was within walking distance and hosting a Bloomberg Media event. I met my colleague Sami Lambert there, where we were treated to the first episode in a new series featuring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, a.k.a. Jamie Lannister, as he travels around the world highlighting innovators and “reasons for optimism” in the climate change space. Coster-Waldau, dressed in a dapper tan suit, made the rounds afterward. 

There were drinks and bites following, where I got to meet several Bloomberg reporters and briefly speak with their chief digital officer Julia Beizer. Sami wore a statement bucket hat the entire day (and evening), which prompted the creation of its own Slack channel at work and netted her a bevy of compliments at the event. 

By Thursday I was pretty exhausted, but was still able to get coffee with a very well-connected source. During our meeting, he introduced me to Savannah James, who was staying at the same hotel. She shared that she was in town to see Lebron play the Knicks (and, surprisingly, win!), catch a Hermes show and try to get tickets to the sold-out André 3000 concert tomorrow night. I told her I had the exact same plans!

That evening I took a date to a comedy show and got drinks after — again, both of which were sorely needed this week.

Friday and Saturday were far less eventful, although on Friday I did go to a party that I was told was at Michaela Coel’s apartment. She was nowhere to be found! But there were many Instagram celebrities in attendance, or so I was informed.

And finally, on Saturday, I spent most of the day baking a red velvet cake for my friend Annie Hildebrand’s birthday, which I then schlepped all the way up to Inwood. For reference, that meant almost two hours spent on the train feverishly guarding my poor cake from any and all inadvertent jostling. Luckily the cake and I made it in one piece, and the evening was well worth the trek.

One good rumor

A lot of news publishers have been hammered by the dismal economy, but not all. One newsletter-based operation apparently had its best quarter in company history last quarter, while another media company, which will report earnings in the next two weeks, itself had its best fourth quarter ever. 

The industry as a whole is shrinking, but the few companies winning are eating up larger and larger shares of the market. For better or for worse, the future will bring consolidation, and that consolidation might bring stability. 

Some good readin’

— The story behind the sriracha shortage is so incredibly stupid. (Fortune)

— More evidence for my burgeoning theory that short men have shaped the world more than tall men. (The New Yorker)

— Andy Reid: I had no idea about the tragedy and nepotism of his children! Or that he is Mormon? (The New York Times)

— Great reporting on Forbes. The company makes no sense but it does … make money! (Puck)

— Speaking of Puck, they launched a sports business newsletter, and in its first edition uncovered a $1.7 billion scoop. (Puck)

Cover image: "Salome Receives the Head of Saint John the Baptist,” by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio