My Messenger Co-Pilot

I’m Darren Samuelsohn and this is The love, journalism Show. First time visiting? Please sign up for my love letter from the beat.

Adam Klasfeld is back for an encore visit. We last spoke when The Messenger came crashing down on both of us in 2024.

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I recruited Adam Klasfeld in the summer of 2023 to join me at The Messenger. He came with a reputation I already knew — deep sourcing, courtroom instincts, the kind of reporter who could walk into a docket cold and know exactly where the story was buried. We spent the next several months chronicling Trump’s courtroom visits together: Florida, New York, DC, Atlanta, one indictment after another, one arraignment after another, building the thing in real time while half the industry waited to see if it would work.

It worked. Lawrence O’Donnell called our trial coverage the best out there. We built the Messenger Scale in a WeWork conference room and used it to get inside the heads of about 80 experts in real time. And then, nine months in, the whole operation collapsed — and I did an episode of this show with Adam and two other members of our legal reporting team, standing in the wreckage, trying to figure out what it had all meant.

That was Episode 16. This is the sequel.

Adam didn’t go back into a newsroom. He built his own — All Rise News, his Substack, his own assigning desk. He’s still covering the same beat, still tracking the same courts, still doing it with the same rigor I watched him bring to a docket three years ago. Except now nobody’s telling him which story to chase.

I wanted to know what that’s actually cost him, and what it’s given him back. I wanted to know what he’d never say to my face when I was still his editor. And I wanted to know, three years and one collapsed newsroom later, whether journalism still loves him back.