On Thursday afternoon, all the content vanished from the DNAinfo and Gothamist network of websites, replaced by a letter from owner and CEO Joe Ricketts announcing that he’d “made the difficult decision to discontinue publishing.” Some 115 employees have been laid off, the New York Times reported, including those working at DNAinfo Chicago, which Ricketts launched in 2012, and Chicagoist, the 13-year-old blog he acquired in March. Staffers will be placed on paid administrative leave through February 2, according to CNN.
The entirety of Ricketts’s letter to DNAinfo and Chicagoist readers is pasted below, but I’ll paraphrase it for you: This outlet for unbiased, invaluable local journalism has a large audience and has made the world a better place. But it isn’t making a profit. And even though I’m worth $2.1 billion and donated millions to the Trump campaign last year—and I can certainly afford to take the loss—I just really, really hate unions.
DNAinfo New York and Gothamist voted on October 26 to join the Writers Guild of America East by a margin of 25-2. When the workers initially organized in the spring, Ricketts told them:
LAist also shut down & LA is worse off for it. We found out when you did. Thank you to everyone who wrote for us, you did great fucking work https://t.co/rHmjvYsADK
— Julia Wick (@sherlyholmes) November 2, 2017
Then Ricketts took his own sledgehammer to what’s become a significant part of the local journalism establishment.
I thought DNA arriving would force papers to cover neighborhoods more & it never happened, & papers actually shrank. This is quite a loss. https://t.co/4wd8LXgWIF
— Peter Nickeas (@PeterNickeas) November 2, 2017
