Tensions Flare Inside The Messenger, a Fledgling News Site

“Wow, how condescending is this?” Mr. Birnbaum wrote, according to a copy of his message reviewed by The New York Times. “Thanks for the lecture.” He quit on the spot and advised Mr. Zimmerman to find another politics editor who “doesn’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 message.

“Who doesn’t like traffic to their news site?” he said in an email. “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.”

Editors met earlier in the week to discuss concerns about the company’s high-volume approach to publishing. The five journalists who spoke on condition of anonymity said they had grown frustrated with the company’s practice of assigning rewrites of competitors’ stories, a practice that was called out by media critics after the site debuted.

Dan Wakeford, The Messenger’s editor in chief, reassured employees during the meetings that it would take months for The Messenger to build credibility, and that critics of the site were taking “things out of context,” according to two of the five people. The company has landed an interview with former President Donald J. Trump and was the first to report the plan by Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida to campaign aggressively for the Republican presidential nomination in Iowa.

Though The Messenger has hired about 150 journalists — falling short of its initial target — the company is still on pace to hit its initial traffic goals, the two people said. A copy of The Messenger’s internal traffic dashboard from Friday reviewed by The Times shows that the company was close to exceeding 100,000 unique visitors for the day. One person familiar with the company’s recruitment efforts said the company was on pace to reach its goal of 175 employees within weeks.

The Messenger is expecting its traffic to grow in coming weeks as it rises through Google’s search ranking algorithm, one of the five people familiar with the company’s inner workings said. The company’s emphasis on clicks is reflected by the company’s employee “playbook,” which was reviewed by The Times. Employees, the playbook says, must ask themselves three questions before they write a story.

“Would I click on this?” the guidelines say, according to the copy. “Would I read the whole thing? Would I share it?”