Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty
One week into fledgling start-up news site The Messenger’s rocky rollout, The New York Times reported this weekend that a top politics editor quit in a spat over the direction of the outlet. He was not the only staffer to resign over such tensions.
Days before the much-hyped website’s launch, Kristin Bender, a west coast breaking news editor, resigned from The Messenger. Her last day was May 11, four days before the site’s debut.
Multiple Messenger sources familiar with the situation told The Daily Beast that Bender’s exit stemmed from frustrations over the work demanded of the west coast breaking news team: an emphasis on aggregated news stories with little, if any, original reporting and a large workload that could have amounted to up to two dozen stories from the team on any given day. Those coverage objectives were not what was presented to reporters and editors upon hiring, the sources added.