Jimmy Finkelstein, the veteran media investor, former owner of The hill, and recent founder of digital news start-up The Messenger, prefers to stay in one of the following two places when he comes back to New York. wife, former CNN producer Pamela Gross, is an alum.) The other is The Carlyle, which Finkelstein invited me to after I twisted his arm to sit down for an interview. When I arrived at the saved hotel on Tuesday morning, about 20 minutes late because traffic on the Upper East Side was a nightmare, The Messenger’s chief of communications met me out front and took us to her boss’s suite, where the towering (literally) 74-year-old tycoon greeted us in a black suit and purple tie.
I had spoken to Finkelstein, who now spends most of his time in Palm Beach, on several occasions over the years, usually when his name was on the line, to buy some legendary journalism institution that was in dire straits. times had hit. Daily news; Time Inc.) This was our first face-to-face meeting. He’s gentle and gentle, to the point where I worried that his voice would register on my recorder, which I placed on a coffee table next to the couch Finkelstein lowered his 6 into. -foot-4-inch frame. He told me that his parents had lived at The Carlyle for 10 years and that he had a sentimental connection to the place. “I know so many people here,” he said.
On the topic: The Messenger had launched just over a week earlier, with $50 million in funding, a $100 million revenue forecast for 2024, and big plans for a 550-person newsroom. buzz ahead of The Daily, the Rupert Murdoch-made an iPad “newspaper” that rippled along for nearly two years in the early 2010s-a lot of money and manpower was poured into an enterprise that people couldn’t quite reach. But while The Daily unveiled with a carefully choreographed, high-gloss presentation at the Guggenheim, with Murdoch on stage alongside Apple’s Eddie Cue, The Messenger entered the world as a sort of beta mode work, essentially ironing out the kinks in real time.
There’s no sugarcoating: the reception by the media cognoscenti has been nothing short of ferocious, perhaps a little too ferocious (and a little too gay), considering this is a place that hires masses of journalists (including some high-profile ones) at respectable salaries, on the heels of a relentless season of layoffs that rattled publications far and wide. Reports of three editors resigning as if storming off a content farm have not helped the case. (Greg Birnbaum, a CNN and NBC News alum, denounced the site for its “predatory and blind, desperate pursuit of traffic” on its way out.)
I read Finkelstein out a few sentences Joshua Benton‘s widely circulated takedown for Nieman Lab: “The thing that’s confusing about The Messenger to everyone else in the media world is that its ideas don’t make any sense. It’s an aggressive denial of the world of digital news publishing in 2023. It is a previous LARPing The Messenger thinks it will reach 100 million unique unique items per month based on lame aggregation… It thinks it can support a newsroom of 550 people on programmatic advertisementThe Messenger comes up with the right pitch for a site funded by Republican mega-donors and run by the man who brought the world John Solomon is: ‘Goods the impartial one!’”
Finkelstein responded with an adamant answer: “I sold The hill a year and a half ago.” (To Nexstar for $130 million.) “The hill earned about $18 million [in profit]”We had an average of 120 million visits per month, with about 70 reporters and 90 people on the newsroom. Obviously it wasn’t impossible, because we did it. Now we’re not just getting the same size, if not bigger, a political [audience]but we’re also going to have sports and business and general news. So, I mean, it’s hard to imagine that we can not do it.”
What seems to trip people up, I suggested, is that The Messenger’s hefty cost structure believes in the mass traffic CPM strategy it seems to be floundering in, especially in a landscape where ad-supported digital brands are, to put it mildly, h save a rough start. This is where Finkelstein wanted to set things right. He gave me an earful about the business model he was hammering away at Richard Beckman, The president of The Messenger (as well as a memorable and controversial personality from Condé Nast’s heyday, who The hill and about Prometheus Global Media’s reinventions of The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, And Adweek.) Addressing the barrage of early criticism, Finkelstein said, “Nobody bothered to ask about the model!”
Fair enough, so let’s hear the man. Programmatic advertising — that’s the cheap and automated stuff — is just one piece of the puzzle, said Finkelstein, whose official title is chairman and CEO. Direct sales begin this summer as The Messenger rolls out branches including news, politics, business, sports, entertainment, technology, health/wellness, food, travel and style. “We’re going after very large advertisers. We expect to have tens of millions of dollars in direct sales in the first year.”
