Joe Ricketts, the Republican donor and billionaire co-founder of TD Ameritrade, started DNAinfo in 2009 out of a belief that local news was vital.

Thursday at 5 p.m., he abruptly shuttered the site along with Gothamist and its sister sites. This, just a week after their reporters voted to unionize. Ricketts said in a statement that DNAinfo was not financially successful, and that he hoped someone would one day "crack the code" in the business of neighborhood journalism.

"Gothamist, which joined our company in the spring, made money. They were financially solvent," former DNAinfo reporter Rachel H. Smith told WNYC. "We were not, I will make that clear. Local news, real reporting, is expensive. But he had just put a giant investment into this company. To shut it down like this, I have to imagine, was retaliatory."

Rachel H. Smith spoke with WNYC's Shumita Basu and Brian Lehrer about the closing of the sites, and how reporters are trying to retrieve the archives of their work.