Chicagoist Website Deletes Negative Joe Ricketts Stories After He Buys Parent Company

CHICAGO, IL — After online local news outlet DNAinfo announced Wednesday it was buying Gothamist LLC, the parent company that owns the Chicagoist and runs four other similar news websites across the country, some media observers noticed something was missing from the archives of the newly acquired sites: A number of negative stories about Joe Ricketts, DNAinfo's owner and patriarch of the family that owns a controlling interest in the Chicago Cubs, had been deleted.

At least five articles critical of Ricketts and dealing with his political involvement as a prominent Republican donor were erased from the Chicagoist and the New York-based Gothamist, according to Jezebel, which first reported the story. Four of the deleted articles, which date back to 2010, deal with Ricketts' opposition to then-President Barack Obama, such as this Chicagoist piece from May 7, 2012, headlined: "Billionaire Cubs Owner Joe Ricketts Commissions Study To Destroy Obama."

Although the articles have been erased from the original sites, nothing ever truly vanishes from the internet. The stories are still cached on the Internet Archive, the report stated.

The decision to delete the articles was made by Gothamist co-founders Jake Dobkin and Jen Chung about a month ago when acquisition talks "were starting to get more serious," Dobkin told Jezebel. No one demanded the stories be pulled, he added.

So why delete the articles in the first place?

"Just as Bloomberg [the news agency co-founded by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg] doesn’t cover [Michael] Bloomberg, we don’t plan to cover Joe Ricketts, and so we decided to take down our coverage of him," Dobkin told Jezebel, which also pointed out — with examples — that Bloomberg does, indeed, cover its owner.

Dobkin's explanation to Jezebel also seems to contradict the Gothamist's announcement of the sale, a piece jointly written by Dobkin and Chung:

"While our politics and backgrounds may differ a bit from those of DNAinfo founder Joe Ricketts (he, for example, is a Cubs fan, while Mr. Met is our favorite baseball figure), we are all committed to building a news organization that offers quality journalism to our readers. We all believe that unbiased reporting is important for our democracy, especially in these times. And we all think that the best way to cover contentious issues is to offer opinions from both sides."

As a new part of the Ricketts empire, the Chicagoist will now become the "offical blog" for DNAinfo Chicago, which will continue reporting on city and neighborhood news, according to the Gothamist's announcement. Dobkin and Chung also floated the idea of DNAinfo expanding to Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., cities where the Gothamist already has sites.

More via Jezebel

Joe Ricketts in 2012 (Nati Harnik | Associated Press)

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