Back on the ‘Stack

Saying goodbye to The Messenger, and looking ahead to what's next.

As you may have read elsewhere, The Messenger, the start-up news site where I used to work, is no more. Many words can be said about what happened there — preferably over drinks — but the upshot is that I am coming back to Substack on a more full-time basis, at least for right now.

I remain humbled and grateful that so many of you were willing to support me and help me maintain the type of content that I had been doing at FiveThirtyEight after being laid off there, which feels like both yesterday and a million years ago. Once I landed at The Messenger, I was happy to refund everyone who paid for a subscription, but I will turn on paid Substack plans again here at this time of upheaval, in the hope that I can continue to make more things that you find interesting and useful.

Before getting to what’s next for me, though, let’s talk briefly about The Messenger. Because to the extent there is something to say, I do want to give credit to the many outstanding people I got to work with there.

Despite the circumstances, Dan Kaufman and Jon Scher built a remarkable sports team filled with many colleagues that I was lucky to get to know. Dan held the team together to the end with professionalism and grace. Jon was an amazing boss and mentor who became a great friend; he encouraged me to make my pet parrot Bucky a YouTube star, and I was thrilled when I found out he had written one of my favorite Sports Illustrated articles about one of my favorite athletes growing up. My only regret is that I didn’t have more time to learn from both of them.

My fellow senior editors were always supportive, professional, creative and a pleasure to work with. Out of that group, I worked most closely with Daniela Perez, Alex Azzi and Matt Gagne, but I also enjoyed it whenever I crossed paths with Ryan Nanni, Gary Gramling and Andrew Julian. At the end, Gary and Andrew (along with Patrick Djordjevic) were incredible in their ability to tune out the noise around the site and make sure their teams of writers were prepared and consistently doing good work.

Speaking of writers, the amount of talent our site had on hand in that capacity was extraordinary. It was always a goal of mine to work with Mike Tanier, whom I have been reading forever, and he was just as gifted a colleague as I expected. The same goes for the great Seth Davis and Jeff Goodman, two college hoops legends — it was exciting to get to make the charts for their Top 25 column every week. Still other writers on the staff impressed me constantly: Arash Markazi (himself a legend), Christian Red (a tremendous investigative reporter), Adam Ronis (whose betting picks are SCARY good), Kaelen Jones (an incredibly quick study on making Datawrapper charts) and Mike Renner (the draftnik’s draftnik).

One final set of shout-outs belongs to the younger writers who powered the breaking news desk. I got the chance to do many stories with Michael Charles, and he is an NBA writer on the rise — he does a great job of mixing the analytics with more and more reporting skills. On many other occasions, I was able to co-byline stories with Kari Anderson, Javon Edmonds, Max Rego, Jackson Thompson, Meghann Morhardt and

Matthew Gutierrez

; each was a joy to work with and impressed me with their work ethic, knowledge and willingness to learn and improve.

Everyone knows it’s a very difficult time to work in the media industry, but each person I listed above would be an asset to your staff if you hired them. (Email me at [neil.paine_at_gmail.com] if you want to hear more about how great they are.)

As for me, I am open to any and all opportunities. I plan to write a (mostly) daily column here during the week, restart my weekend round-up newsletters and continue updating and adding to my stats/rankings/models, plus do video essays (YouTube content forthcoming…) and create other treats for paid subscribers. I hope that you will join me along the way, and help me keep making content as long as I can. If you made it this far, thank you for reading — and I look forward to the next chapter, which hopefully will last longer than this most recent one.

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