The Messenger Internal Friction Alienates Journalists and Causes Editor to Resign, New York Times Reports

thewrap.com:

The New York Times reports that internal confusion and frustration has gripped the site’s staff in its opening week of operation.

Several anonymous journalists at The Messenger tell the NY Times that multiple breaking news teams have been assigned to write up stories based on news broken from other sites, leading to confusion on who is assigned which story.

On more than one occassion, The Messenger published two versions of the same story from editors unaware of each other’s work.

This led Gregg Birnbaum, a former NBC News and Miami Herald editor who worked on The Messenger’s political team, to resign on the spot after a terse online exchange with the site’s traffic chief Neetan Zimmerman, who instructed the editors to coordinate their stories via an online form instead of on Slack and blamed Birnbaum’s team for the confusion over story assignments. “Who doesn’t like traffic to their news site?” Birnbaum told the Times. “But the rapacious and blind desperate chasing of traffic — by the nonstop gerbil wheel rewriting story after story that has first appeared in other media outlets in the hope that something, anything, will go viral — has been a shock to the system and a disappointment to many of the outstanding quality journalists at The Messenger who are trying to focus on meaningful original and distinctive reporting.”Founded by former co-owner of The Hill and The Hollywood Reporter Jimmy Finkelstein, The Messenger launched this week after raising $50 million to lure journalists with offers of salaries far above established competitors. “People are exhausted with extreme politics and platforms that inflame the divisions in our country by slanting stories towards an audience’s bias.