Setting The Scale

Willy Blackmore contemplates the shallowness of The Messenger, digital media’s latest buzzy startup.

 

After months of media news dominated by layoffs and site closures, there was a story of a different kind last week: a new website launched, The Messenger, which has the grand aspiration to scale up to 100 million monthly uniques, which (as Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton pointed out) is a little less than the New York Times’ digital audience.

That of course was always going to be an incredible stretch, as is the newsroom of 550 journalists that owner Jimmy Finkelstein (formerly co-owner of The Hill) says he wants to hire within a year. And the firehose-like barrage of stories published by The Messenger during its debut — over 200 in the first day alone — made it abundantly clear that the new site really has nothing new to offer. The endless aggregations — each peppered with trash programmatic ads and multiple lists of internal links that are barely discernible from the Outbrain chum box at the bottom of the page — are an unfortunate throwback to the Upworthy-era of online news (circa 2012), when quickly rehashing someone else’s reporting and slapping the right headline on it was all you needed to make a story go viral. 

But if The Messenger doesn’t have anything remotely fresh to offer in terms of an overall editorial approach, it does have an innovative way to package and present big stories: The Messenger Scale, which it bills as being “like the ‘Richter Scale’ for earthquakes — but for news.” (The E. Jean Carroll verdict, which broke before The Messenger launched, was retroactively rated a 6.) As innovations in media go, rating news events on a scale of one to 10 based on feedback from a slew of “news seismologists” is not only incredibly dumb but also happens to be very on-trend. 

The Messenger Scale joins both Semafor’s signature story format, the semaform, and a new New York Times news story format that features subsections like “Why It Matters.” All are presented as ways of cutting through inverted-pyramid formalities to tell the reader how it really is — this is an earth-shaking big deal; this is what I, the reporter, actually think; this is Why It Matters — solving the problem of…what? Being more transparent with readers, allegedly. But all that they manage in practice is establishing a very narrow, shallow definition of what matters for the reader — an innovation that no one has exactly been clamoring for.

Unlike the Richter scale, based on the actual measurement of seismic waves, the Messenger Scale is essentially a snap poll of around 80 people “from the worlds of politics, policy, law, history, academia and media” who will be asked during Big News Moments to rank how much they think that news event matters on a scale from one to 10. Not all of them will answer — as was the case with the first Messenger Scale moment, the release of the Durham Report (4.6), which earned responses from about half of the news seismologists — so the quality of the average rating will vary depending on the news. And then there are the people whose opinions inform the Scale, which include one-time “Dancing with the Stars” contestant (and former Trump Press Secretary) Sean Spicer and former Trump White House lawyer Ty Cobb. (The list, designed to be balanced, does also include people like Michael Podhorzer, an advisor to Richard Trumka.) 

Like the New York Times’s infamous election needle, which the Messenger Scale’s graphics must be alluding to, the rating system is only trotted out on special occasions. So if you wanted an official ranking for the “Scandoval” scoop that The Messenger somehow scored hours before the highly anticipated “Vanderpump Rules” finale, no dice. Similarly, there’s no rating for “Swimmers Find Teeth on Beach, Are Searching for Owner” or “Pete Buttigieg Says Tucker Carlson Has ‘Fears About Masculinity,’” which really takes the potential for fun out of things.

Over at Semafor, Ben Smith’s newsroom is more committed to the bit: nearly every story falls into the semaform format, which includes slugs like “The Reporter’s View” and “Room for Disagreement.” 

“Our goal is to provide more transparency, broader viewpoints, and distilled insights: to give readers more clarity about what we know, what we think, and a window into how others see the subject,” executive editor Gina Chua wrote when both the site and format launched last fall. The Times, similarly, is breaking the fourth wall of its view from nowhere to tell the reader not only what is important but why. 

The insights, however, haven’t been particularly sharp, and recall the explainers of early Vox.com, a story format innovation that rather quickly disappeared. In a piece about Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani having to surrender for their prison terms, the section reads, in part, “Their convictions and sentencing … has contributed to the feeling in Silicon Valley that the era of the ‘fake it till you make it’ approach may be winding down.” Which, ok? The “Why” for a story about trash containerization in New York reminds readers that “New York City is notorious for allowing towers of foul-smelling trash bags to line the streets.” 

So, why does this all matter? There’s the basic annoyance of being told how to read, instead of just being allowed to read (and read between the lines) for yourself. But it cuts deeper than that, too: one of the key issues in media right now is the conflict between an old, narrow understanding of what opinions are allowed into supposedly opinion-free writing, and a more modern (and vital) understanding of basic humanity — such as, Black Lives Matter, homeless people should not be murdered, or trans people have the right to exist. Deliberately giving space in a story for a reporter’s analysis, or for an objective measure of newsworthy-ness, even, feels like a hollow attempt at transparency. 

What we really need is to actually lay bare the decision-making process that goes into deciding what stories to tell, who will tell them, and how. Thanks to rising tensions at The Messenger since last week (getting bashed by just about everyone has not been great for morale), and the leaks that followed, we have at least a glimpse of what the editorial edict is at the publication, and how low the bar really is. According to a New York Times story, there are three guiding questions for writing any Messenger story: “Would I click on this? Would I read the whole thing? Would I share it?” Maybe if it was still 2012, I might. 

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INTRODUCING THE STUDY SCALE

 

Study Hall editors Daniel Spielberger and Erin Corbett, and original founder Eric Studyhall, agree that this Digest is a 9 on the Study Scale, which is a very real rating system. 

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COMINGS AND GOINGS

—Ross Andersen, who is currently a senior editor at The Atlantic, will be moving forward as a staff writer for the magazine in June.
—Danielle Chemtob is leaving Axios Charlotte. She was covering “urban renewal” and “affordable housing.”
—Ben White is leaving Politico as chief economic correspondent at the end of the month. In June, he will be starting a new role as chief Wall Street correspondent at The Messenger.
—Zak Jason is leaving WIRED after 4.5 years as a research director and features editor.
—David Gelles is taking over the New York Times’s “Climate Forward” newsletter from Somini Sengupta, as managing correspondent. Sengupta will move to an expanded role as global climate correspondent.
—Samantha Rollins is now deputy editor of Entertainment at Insider.
—G. Elliott Morris is leaving the Economist to oversee the ABC News Politics / FiveThirtyEight team as its new editorial director. 

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EVERYTHING ELSE

—Over the weekend, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO and president David Zaslav was met with protests while giving a commencement speech at his alma mater, Boston University. The graduating class chanted  “pay your writers.” One carried an “Ew, David” sign and others decorated their caps with stickers endorsing the WGA’s ongoing strike. During Zaslav’s speech, a plane flew by with a banner that read, “David Zaslav Pay Your Writers.” According to BU Today, “nearly 200” protesters also picketed outside the ceremony, with some graduates joining the action while wearing their caps and gowns. Commencement speeches are opportunities for powerful people to self-aggrandize and regurgitate a Pinterest mood board of platitudes that boil down to Update your LinkedIn and um, good luck! Zaslav likely assumed he could just roll up to BU and it’d be business as usual. Congratulations to all the graduates who reminded the CEO that he can’t run or hide from not paying his workers a fair wage!
—Autostraddle eliminated the positions of their subject editors, which include Sex and Dating, Culture, and Community.
—It turns out that the combination of rapidly accelerating AI technology and Twitter’s nonsensical verification system can lead to the proliferation of misinformation — who would have thought? On Monday morning, an image of an explosion at the Pentagon that was likely generated using AI spread across social media, causing a brief, albeit concerning, dip in the US stock market. A verified Twitter account that falsely purported to be associated with Bloomberg News shared the image, as did the State-sponsored Russian news outlet, Russia Today. Maybe Elon Musk and Ron DeSantis can discuss the incident during their little heart to heart tonight.
—Last week, Rolling Stone reported that Fox News shut down its investigative unit to cut costs in the fallout from its $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems. Staffers confirmed layoffs are happening, and a former employee told Rolling Stone, “They have to save money because of the [Dominion] lawsuit.”
—The NYTimes Guild and New York Times have reached a tentative agreement after more than two years of negotiations. The contract includes an immediate raise of up to 12.5 percent with raises of 3.25 percent in 2024 and 3 percent in 2025.
—The Desert Sun News Guild is going on a one-day strike to secure a fair contract. “Our pay has not kept up with the valley’s rapidly rising cost of living, which has been supercharged in the last two years by the enormous inflation seen nationwide,” journalists of the newspaper, owned by Gannett, wrote on their strike fund. “What our staff is no longer willing to do, however, is struggle to just get by while Gannett executives earn multimillion dollar annual salaries.”