CONFIDER

The Messenger’s Mess Might’ve Just Gotten Even Messier

Amid persistent fears of layoffs and financial woes, we’ve got some new dispatches from inside the highly hyped media startup.

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This reporting is featured in this week’s edition of Confider, the newsletter pulling back the curtain on the media. Subscribe here and send your questions, tips, and complaints here.

Amid the looming threat of layoffs and financial woes, The Messenger’s founder Jimmy Finkelstein wrote to his embattled newsroom late last week with some holiday cheer.

“The Messenger has only been in business for six months and I am tremendously proud of what has been accomplished,” he wrote in the memo obtained and reviewed by Confider. “This year’s achievements wouldn’t have been possible without your hard work and dedication.”

The media tycoon touted that the site had grown at a “remarkable” pace, citing Google Analytics to claim the publication had 63.8 million page views in October, a 34 percent leap over the previous month.

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And then, he claimed, “We continued to grow in November and exceeded 77 million page views. The core of this growth is our ability to produce intelligent, vital and timely journalism.”

But multiple newsroom insiders who spoke with Confider insisted there’s a reason Finkelstein specifically quoted Google Analytics and avoided Comscore, the industry standard, altogether: The Comscore traffic numbers were actually “horrific,” as one source put it.

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A rep for The Messenger wrote to Confider: “Our Comscore numbers aren’t live yet due to technical issues outside our control. Given that Comscore doesn’t know our numbers yet, it would be impossible for you or anyone else to know what they are. We look forward to seeing our numbers correctly reported soon.”

Elsewhere in the fledgling outlet’s newsroom, a homepage editor was fired earlier this month, Confider has learned, after she wrote in a group Slack channel that she felt she was being “asked to lie” when management told her to place an e-commerce post about Cyber Monday into a prominent slot of the site’s “Popular” section typically denoting articles that have been widely read or shared.

“[H]ow do you know it’ll be the 3rd most popular story through Sunday?” that baffled homepage editor, Lisa Letostak, asked a colleague. “[J]ournalists shouldn’t publish lie, they shouldn’t be asked to lie by their employer, & having this conversation repeatedly is risking all our careers & our personal & professional reputations & it’s stressing me out,” she continued in the Slack channel.

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“Ms. Letostak was fired for ongoing performance issues,” a rep for The Messenger said.

“The Cyber Monday commerce promotion was placed as an advertisement and clearly labeled. It specifically says that it is not produced by The Messenger’s editorial department,” the rep continued. A cached version of the homepage touting that article, however, does not appear to openly disclose the e-commerce nature of the story—until readers click into it.

Letostak declined to comment.

—Corbin Bolies contributed reporting.

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