Grid

» see grid.news as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Grid launched in Washington in January 2022 with a daily newsletter and a newsroom hired out of Vox and ABC News. It aimed itself squarely at the people who run the American federal government, with Laura McGann as executive editor and Mark Bauman running the company. Within a month it had published an investigation into the Canadian convoy protests that the House Oversight Committee picked up and used to press Meta.

By late 2022 the thing was working on the measures journalism uses. A second newsletter had launched on healthcare in September and Adweek named McGann its editor of the year in October. Readership was running past two million a month. Then Bauman stepped down from the chief executive job on 7 November 2022 and stayed on as an advisor. That is the first sign in the public record of the business side failing to keep up with the editorial side.

On 22 March 2023 The Messenger bought Grid and everything attached to it, for a price neither side published. Five days after that, on the afternoon of Monday 27 March, the website went off and the address was pointed at the buyer. The buyer did not have a publication yet.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the 360 ~

The house format had a name and a rule. A 360 took one story and ran it through several contexts at once, so a piece about an election might be reported simultaneously as an economics story and a misinformation story, with a different writer on each thread and one piece at the end. It reads well when it works and it is expensive, and the same newsroom was filing a daily newsletter underneath it.

~ abu dhabi money in washington ~

The ten million dollars that started Grid came mostly from International Media Investments, which sits inside the Abu Dhabi Media Investment Corporation, privately held by the deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates. The same group holds a minority position in Euronews. The rest came from a technology executive named Brian Edelman.

Grid disclosed the funding and was asked about it anyway, because the product was a newsroom covering American policy and the money behind it was a foreign state's. The newsroom was real and the questions about the money were fair, and both of those stayed true for all fourteen months.

~ five days in march ~

Axios had the scoop on the morning of the day it happened: the site would be gone that afternoon. Nieman Lab wrote it up as a hiring move with an audience attached, because what The Messenger was buying was roughly fifty journalists seven weeks before it had anywhere to put them. The buyer would say only that it looked forward to taking on the majority of them over the coming weeks.

The Messenger published its own first story on 15 May 2023.

~ what the messenger kept ~

It kept the back catalog and the newsletter. The name it dropped. Then on 31 January 2024, ten months after switching Grid off, Jimmy Finkelstein emailed his own staff that operations were ending that day. Open www.grid.news now and the redirect still works perfectly, delivering you to themessenger.com, which is two and a half kilobytes of nothing with an email address on it.

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