Messenger implosion: I know what those journalists were thinking. I thought it about Fusion.

Many media observers have compared the meltdown of the Messenger—which blew through $50 million in under a year and pursued a growth plan better suited to 2014—to the disaster that was Quibi, the short-form video startup that collapsed basically as soon as it launched in 2020. But the real comparison that should be made here is to Fusion, where I worked for a little over a year, from 2014–16. Yes, Fusion lasted longer, and even merged and mutated a few times before finally taking its last breath (as Splinter News) in 2019. (Well, it could always be reanimated, hopefully not like the Hairpin.) But it comes to mind because it was a similar roller coaster. I would be lying if I said that when I took the job, I was fully confident in Fusion’s future. And once I arrived, I never had any idea how in the world we were going to last.

So why did I take a job at a place I wasn’t positive would survive, let alone thrive? In 2014 it was different than it is today. Facebook was still a fire hose of clicks, and a bunch of places were dedicated to riding the wave, from Fusion to Mashable to Vocativ. Even more legacy media brands were benefiting from the platforms. This prosperity meant there were a lot of jobs. The media business expanded, audience development became a thing, and there was a lot of hopping around, at least for some of us. That was fun! It took me from Adweek to Yahoo News to NBC News to Fusion, and I learned new things at each place, not just about how to distribute on the platforms, but about how to use them for newsgathering, for contacting sources, for spotting trends. As much as I think that what Facebook wreaked on media overall is terrible—and good riddance!—there were some upsides. More jobs and diversity in our business were two.

I was working at NBC News when the opportunity at Fusion materialized. I was looking to leave my role running the digital newsroom at the network—there was a leadership change at the top, and I didn’t agree with the strategy being imposed on me and my team—and I called my friend Anna Holmes to tell her what was going on. She was at Fusion. “You should come here,” she said. “We could use someone with your skills.” So what happened was I had a few meetings, and they offered me a big job with a hugely inflated title—global news director—and a ton of money. (Not Messenger EIC money, but still.) I didn’t really understand what Fusion was, but there were some cool people there and I’d figure out my job when I got there, right?

Well, sort of. There was a lot of confusion and shuffling and changing of roles—eventually, my job narrowed to oversee 2016 election stuff—but none of that is all that important. What is important is that once I got there, I understood that in a year’s time we needed to double our traffic—I cannot remember if the metric was unique visitors or page views—in order to meet the overall revenue goals agreed to by our executives. It was daunting. Fortunately, we had an audience development team that would help distribute our work in a way that would drive this growth.

Unfortunately, our editorial mission—to cover underserved communities, to focus on social justice, to focus on millennial readers and generally push for progressive social change—was fairly misaligned with our packaging strategy, which was ripped from Upworthy.

So, all along this brief and stressful ride, I wondered: How long will we/Fusion last? Men at the top had shelled out exorbitant salaries to big names, execs, and newsroom leaders. (I would bundle myself in that last category, based on the amount of experience I had at the time.) We even had a future conspiracy theorist being paid handsomely for documentary work that largely never materialized. People attended Davos. Increasingly, the brass asked for viral hits while our newsroom had been assembled to do the meaningful, impactful journalism we were told would define Fusion. At one point in late 2015, I got a call from an executive asking me if I wanted to do a Fusion bus tour across America; he’d met a guy who specialized in this and we could bankroll it as long as I could get the payment completed before the end of the year. (Budgets are always use-it-or-lose-it.) There were hundreds of thousands of dollars there for me to just …. do a bus tour. I did plan a bus tour, although I left Fusion before the project came to fruition. (When I got to HuffPost in 2017, though, we executed my original vision for this project as Listen to America, a career highlight for myself and lots of other folks who were part of it.)

My point is: It felt as if there was money everywhere at Fusion. There even WAS money at Fusion, for a while. But I knew even early on that the money continuing to flow was contingent on a kind of growth that we were never going to find. And that meant that the revenue to sustain us was never going to be there. I suspect that a number of folks at the Messenger had these same fears, feelings, suspicions. How could they not have, given the bombast of the owners from the outset, claiming they could do something—basically, rejack social media in order to bring in millions of dollars in revenue—that experts at that very thing had failed to achieve after years of trying?

I left Fusion in 2016 to embark on a different, fatally flawed project that I won’t catalog here. It was bittersweet. I did have a sense of relief because sometimes things are so broken and tangled that even people like myself, who relish taking on the myriad problems of newsrooms and the news business, cannot see a path forward. But I also felt extremely guilty. I had hired some great people into Fusion—the tiny, optimistic side of myself hoped that if we did get the right team, we would crack a code—and I was abandoning them, not to a sinking ship, but to a slowly leaking one. A lot of very, very excellent journalists worked at Fusion and Splinter. I hope they can at least still access their clips.

I can only imagine the thought processes of people who left good jobs to go to the Messenger. Perhaps they were just offered a ton of money (seems conceivable, based on what we know about the EIC’s salary and the flagrant spending on office space) and couldn’t turn it down. (Who can blame them, in this industry?) Perhaps, like me at NBC News, they were unhappy where they were and figured: Why not take a risk? Perhaps, like the writer of this good piece about the Messenger’s last day, they were freelancing and figured that trying a full-time gig could bring some upside. (And it may have, except that the Messenger seems to have erased all of its writers’ work.)

Or perhaps they actually believed they could pull it off, or that the executives above them could. I do not blame anyone for believing. I suppose there are still folks out there who haven’t had their hearts ripped out by this business and who can still be receptive to bombastic pronouncements of the likes we heard from the Messenger’s CEO. Although I haven’t met anyone like that in a very, very long time.

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