DNAinfo, Chicagoist Shut Down, Owner Joe Ricketts Announces

CHICAGO, IL — Just over six months after he acquired Gothamist, eight years after founding DNAinfo and exactly one week after staff voted to join a union, owner Joe Ricketts announced Thursday he was shutting down all of his local news websites, effective immediately.

Visitors to the sites were presented with a letter from Ricketts announcing he would discontinue publishing the network of websites that includes Chicagoist, Gothamist, LAist, SFist, DCist, as well as DNAinfo news sites in Chicago and New York.

The content management system and the website were deactivated at 5 p.m. Thursday, and staff were not given advance notice of the shutdown, DNAinfo sources told Patch.

Ricketts boasted the combined companies would be "the most potent online source of neighborhood news and information available anywhere," when he acquired Gothamist in March.

Then, earlier this year, staff at both DNAinfo and Gothamist were warned unionization could be the "final straw" for the organization.

“DNAinfo has lost money since it began operation ... It’s never been profitable. ... DNAInfo has been supported by a single investor, Joe Ricketts,” DNAinfo Chief Operating Officer Dan Swartz wrote in an email to staff in April.

"At some point, the business needs to be profitable or the investor calls it quits," Swartz said Ricketts' has spent "tens of millions of dollars of his own money" to keep the site alive. A copy of the email was obtained by Patch.

Reporters and editors voted 25-2 last Thursday in favor of joining Writers Guild of America East after Ricketts declined to recognize the union earlier this year, the guild announced in a news release.

"I declined to recognize the WGAE as the collective bargaining representative of our New York editorial employees because I believe DNAinfo is more likely to succeed if the company’s ownership and employees face the intensely competitive media landscape together, without interference by an outside labor union. That remains my view," Ricketts wrote in an earlier letter to employees. Other digital newsrooms to have unionized in recent years include the former Gawker Media websites, Huffington Post, Law360 and Vice.

Announcing the shutdown Thursday, Ricketts said DNAinfo was "at the end of the day, a business, and businesses need to be economically successful if they are to endure. And while we made important progress toward building DNAinfo into a successful business, in the end, that progress hasn't been sufficient to support the tremendous effort and expense needed to produce the type of journalism on which the company was founded."

The Writers Guild of America East tweeted a statement Thursday night. "We are deeply concerned by Joe Ricketts' decision to shut down DNAinfo New York and Gothamist," it read.
"...The Guild will be looking at all of our potential areas of recourse and we will aggressively pursue our new members' rights."

According to a memo to employees acquired by CNN, all employees will be placed on administrative leave until Feb. 2, 2018. It said staffers will keep receiving their salaries until that date unless they begin working full-time elsewhere. Ricketts will begin negotiation with the Writers Guild of America East on Friday.

top half of the memo mirrored the message posted on the sites. here's the full email sent to staff. pic.twitter.com/Wfh74OnMNh
— Tom Kludt (@TomKludt) November 2, 2017

Read Joe Ricketts' complete letter announcing the discontinuation of DNAinfo and Gothamist below:

Today, I've made the difficult decision to discontinue publishing DNAinfo and Gothamist. Reaching this decision wasn't easy, and it wasn't one I made lightly.

I started DNAinfo in 2009 at a time when few people were investing in media companies. But I believed an opportunity existed to build a successful company that would report unbiased neighborhood news and information. These were stories that weren't getting told, and because I believe people care deeply about the things that happen where they live and work, I thought we could build a large and loyal audience that advertisers would want to reach.

A lot of what I believed would happen did, but not all of it. 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. 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. And in the process, I believe we've left the world a better place.

But DNAinfo is, at the end of the day, a business, and businesses need to be economically successful if they are to endure. And while we made important progress toward building DNAinfo into a successful business, in the end, that progress hasn't been sufficient to support the tremendous effort and expense needed to produce the type of journalism on which the company was founded. I want to thank our readers for their support and loyalty through the years. And I want to thank our employees for their tireless effort and dedication.

I'm hopeful that in time, someone will crack the code on a business that can support exceptional neighborhood storytelling for I believe telling those stories remains essential.

Sincerely,

Joe Ricketts
Chief Executive Officer

Patch Manhattan editor Brendan Krisel contributed

_{Top photo: Joe Ricketts in 2012 | Credit: Nati Harnik | Associated Press}