“Wow, how condescending is this?” Mr. Birnbaum wrote, according to a copy of his post reviewed by The New York Times. “Thanks for the reading.” He stopped on the spot and advised Mr. Zimmerman to find another political editor who “don’t know what they’re doing, so you can tell them what to do.”
In an interview, Mr. Birnbaum, who has previously worked at CNN, NBC News and The Miami Herald, confirmed that he wrote the Slack post.
“Who doesn’t like traffic to their news site?” he said in an email. “But the predatory and blind desperate pursuit of traffic – through the non-stop gerbil wheel rewriting story after story first published in other media in the hope that something, anything, will go viral – is a shock to the system and been a disappointment. to many of the excellent quality journalists at The Messenger who try to focus on meaningful, original and distinctive reporting.”
Editors met earlier this week to discuss concerns about how the company is publishing at high volumes. The five journalists who spoke on condition of anonymity said they had grown frustrated with the company’s practice of assigning rewrites of competitor stories, a practice called out by media critics after the site debuted.
Dan Wakeford, The Messenger’s editor-in-chief, assured staff at the meetings that it would take months for The Messenger to build credibility and that two out of five people said they were “taking things out of context”. The company landed an interview with former President Donald J. Trump and was the first to report Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ plan to aggressively campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in Iowa.
While The Messenger has hired some 150 journalists — falling short of its original goal — the company is still on track to meet its initial traffic targets, the two people said. A copy of The Messenger’s internal traffic dashboard from Friday, reviewed by The Times, shows the company had surpassed nearly 100,000 unique visitors for the day. A person familiar with the company’s recruiting efforts said the company was on track to reach its goal of 175 employees within weeks.
According to one of five people familiar with the inner workings of the company, Messenger expects traffic to grow in the coming weeks as it rises through Google’s search ranking algorithm. The company’s emphasis on clicks is reflected in the company’s ‘playbook’ for employees, which was reviewed by The Times. Employees, the script says, should ask themselves three questions before writing a story.
“Shall I click on this?” the guidelines say, according to the copy. “Would I read it all the way through? Would I share it?”
