DNAinfo and Gothamist Shut Down After Employees Join Union
One week to the day after reporters and editors at the news outlets DNAinfo and Gothamist voted to join a union, their owner shut them down.
Launched in 2009 by TD Ameritrade co-founder Joe Ricketts, DNAinfo was known for its on-the-ground neighborhood coverage. Back in March 2017, Ricketts also purchased Gothamist and its network of websites covering cities around the United States. But after months of fighting with employees at DNAinfo's New York bureau over efforts to unionize, Ricketts announced Thursday he could no longer sustain the business.
"Today, DNAinfo and Gothamist deliver news and information each day to over half a million people's email inboxes; we have over 2 million fans across our social channels; and each month, we have over 15 million visits to our sites by over 9 million people," Ricketts said in a statement. "But more important than large numbers of visits and fans, we've reported tens of thousands of stories that have informed, impacted, and inspired millions of people."
On Thursday afternoon, those tens of thousands of stories had vanished, replaced by Ricketts' statement on the publication's closure.
The announcement caught employees at both media outlets by surprise. Gwynne Hogan, who covered northern Brooklyn and Ridgewood, Queens, for DNAinfo, said she was on the phone with her editor discussing a story when they found out their company no longer existed. She said the website had a special perspective.
"We've been on the ground documenting the little minutiae of New York City neighborhoods for so many years in a media landscape that has been drastically changing and to lose all of that is so sad," said Hogan, a former WNYC intern.
The shutdown came a week after New York-based reporters and editors voted to join the Writers Guild of America, East — a move that Ricketts had vehemently opposed. The Writers Guild and union members said that Ricketts had threatened to shutter the websites during negotiations.
"It's not like between this week and last week we stopped making money," said reporter Katie Honan, who covered Queens for DNAInfo. "It hasn't been profitable. And that was something we were hoping to work on together, in finding ways to make it so."
"Local news, real reporting, is expensive," former DNAinfo reporter Rachel H. Smith told WNYC's Brian Lehrer. "But [Ricketts] had just put a giant investment into this company. To shut it down like this, I have to imagine, was retaliatory."
The closure not only means that more journalists are out of a job. When Ricketts replaced the DNAinfo and Gothamist homepages with his statement, reporters suddenly lost their work samples — "clips" as they're known in the trade. Honan says that could make it harder to find new work, as journalists rely on their stories to prove their skills.
"There's also just readers who enjoyed reading what we've written in the past," Honan said. "That seems to be, at least at this point, not accessible."
In a statement, the Writers Guild of America, East said it is deeply concerned by Ricketts' decision.
"The Guild will be looking at all of our potential areas of recourse and we will aggressively pursue our new members rights," the union said. "We will meet with management in the near future to address all of these issues. We are currently working with the staff at DNAinfo and Gothamist to support them in this difficult time.”
Ricketts has not responded to a request for comment.
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