Who media bust-outs leave behind

When my soon-to-be-defunct former employer did its first round of firings of tenured and tenure-track faculty, a colleague of mine whose line was terminated during her first semester of employment was able to get a another T-T job at a liberal arts college despite being in a field with a particularly dismal job market. Her position at the new college was eliminated within a couple of years. This thing of ours!

Journalism can see academia and raise it:

I covered the NFL for three media outlets in the last calendar year: Football Outsiders, The Messenger, and The New York Times. Two of those outlets died. The third got rid of its entire sports section. I am forced to conclude that I am the grim reaper, harbinger of doom, the herald of the sports media apocalypse. Or maybe the industry’s just broadly and systemically broken, and I happen to have especially rotten luck. You can decide.

The story of Football Outsiders being taking over and destroyed by Canadian finance dipshits has been well-told. But one remarkable detail is that while they stopped paying employees they refused to lay them off or shut down, making it much more difficult to get unemployment benefits:

I was unemployed. I was not collecting unemployment, however. Football Outsiders technically still existed, though no one had received a dime since April. The handful of remaining full-timers were still technically employed, except for me: I formally and publicly resigned on April 30. 

The good thing about a public resignation is that it gets attention in an attention economy: The NFL internet knew that I was on the market. The bad thing about a public resignation is that it’s proof that you quit, rather than getting laid off. Quitters don’t get unemployment benefits, even if their former employer only exists as a stack of bills on the table of a would-be captain of industry hiding somewhere in Ontario from an ever-increasing number of process servers.

The story of the Messenger is one of even more spectacular incompetence:

Media companies give out MacBooks the way Olive Garden doles out breadsticks. Bleacher Report issued me a laptop in 2014. I FedEx’d it back to them unused in 2020. EdjSports gave me a laptop in 2021. I returned it in May of 2023 to the home address of a 20-something Champion Gaming “employee” who had not been paid in weeks so that he could drive it to the storage facility which housed the cremated remains of Football Outsiders.

The folks at The Messenger handed me a MacBook on Aug. 1, my onboarding day. That laptop is still buried under paperwork somewhere in my office as I write this. Three hundred employees at about a thousand dollars per fancy laptop equals a whole lot of wasted money, though not as much wasted money as unused 25th-floor office space in a building one block from the World Trade Center.

In addition to the mostly unused office space in lower Manhattan, they also had mostly unused offices in LA and…West Palm Beach, presumably so Finkelstein could hang out more easily with his very good friend at Mar-a-Lago.

Laptops as party favors? Check. Cavernous, nearly-empty offices? Check. I knew on my first day that The Messenger was a money incinerator, and not destined to last. The site was already earning a reputation for churning out piles of Florida Man Strangles Middle School Teacher He Followed on OnlyFans–type clickbait. And I learned why it had taken weeks for me to officially get hired: CEO Jimmy Finkelstein insisted on ceremoniously approving every single hire after listening to a formal request from their editor, as if he were some ancient monarch hearing petitions by emissaries from Hattusa. By the time I signed on, seven figures per month were going up in flames, with almost no revenue trickling in, while Finkelstein pretended he was J. Jonah Jameson.

The detail about Finkelstein insisting on personally approving every hire is another level.

Things imploded as you’d expect:

Jan. 30: The NFL sends an email announcing last call for media hotels. Taking a calculated risk that even a two-week notice of a shutdown would now encompass the Super Bowl, I book a non-refundable room at the Excalibur for eight days.

Jan. 31: The Super Bowl coverage team meets at 3:30 p.m. amid apocalyptic rumors. We discuss logistics and plans in language usually heard at Irish wakes: If we but live to see tomorrow, we shall drink together in the land of gold and whiskey. 

A New York Times article lands in the Slack channel as the meeting is wrapping up. We’re done. News of The Messenger’s death reached the Times news desk before its own, which would be a multifaceted problem if anything mattered anymore. The Super Bowl meeting wraps like the victory party for a candidate down by 40 percentage points. Finkelstein’s email, headlined “DIFFICULT NEWS,” reaches my inbox shortly after.  

The Messenger didn’t merely shut down operations. It scrubbed most of the evidence of its existence before the end of the business day. Articles posted and promoted hours earlier vanished. Links returned a white screen with “The Messenger” and an email address in king-sized black type; no archives remained. The company Slack channel, where fretful colleagues had posted pet photos for hours on that final day, shut down before many of us even received Finkelstein’s this-got-hard-so-I-quit missive. I imagine Finkelstein stopped just short of ordering the fire alarm pulled at the Manhattan office and locking the door behind everyone. 

Only a zombie Twitter account shambled on, posting pre-scheduled content. The head of the social media department had been shoved out the door with everyone else. “I could kill [the scheduled posts] now and spare the embarrassment,” this person said in a Slack channel cobbled together by and for the recently unemployed. “I thought leaving them might be fun, and the last sign or proof that any of us had anything to show for our work.”

Especially for younger journalists, to work for a year and not even have any clips to show for it online…what a racket.

Tanier has a Substack if you’re into that kind of thing, and it’s hard to blame anyone from getting off this particular runaway train.