DNAinfo, Gothamist Union Negotiates Deal For Fired Employees

NEW YORK, NY — The union representing writers and editors for local news outlets DNAinfo and Gothamist has negotiated a deal with billionaire Joe Ricketts, who shut the news sites down at the beginning of the month.

Writers Guild of America East announced Monday that the union won "substantial gains beyond the initial offer made by management" for workers who lost their jobs when Ricketts took the sites offline.

Employees who lost their jobs will:

• Receive three months of full pay and benefits, and four weeks severance pay even if they obtain other employment;
• Be able to use and expand on work produced for DNAinfo or Gothamist;
• Not be required to sign a non-disparagement provision against their former employer.

Ricketts' company also agreed not to remain in the local news business, or start a new local news venture for two years. Any asset sale of DNAinfo or Gothamist must be to a third party and conducted at arm’s length, the Writers Guild of America East announces.

"The reporters at DNAinfo and Gothamist stayed strong despite the vocal hostility of management (especially owner Joe Ricketts), and their solidarity proves the value of collective bargaining," Lowell Peterson, executive director of the Writers Guild of America East, said in a statement. "They identified the real needs of the entire unit and achieved the best shutdown agreement possible under the circumstances. We have learned the importance of building a collective voice in digital media."

The deal negotiated between Writers Guild of America East and Ricketts will apply to all union and non-union former employees of DNAinfo and Gothamist, a DNAinfo spokesperson told Patch.

"We are pleased to have quickly reached a fair and equitable agreement with the WGA East," the spokesperson said in a statement.

Ricketts said he made the "difficult decision" to close the websites because they were not economically viable. DNAinfo and Gothamist also had outlets in Chicago which too have closed. Gothamist's stable included Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington DC.

"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," Ricketts said in a statement

DNAinfo never returned a profit.

Nowhere in Ricketts' statement was it mentioned that editorial staffers of both websites in New York voted overwhelmingly to unionize last week. Of the 27 staff members who voted in a National Labor Relations Board election, 25 voted in favor of joining Writers Guild of America East, the guild announced in a press release.

In an email sent to staff in April, a copy of which was seen by Patch, DNAinfo's Chief Operating Officer Dan Swartz suggested Ricketts might close the sites if workers unionized. DNAinfo reporter Noah Hurowitz, who was a vocal leader in the effort to unionize, claimed the shutdown was Ricketts' response to the union vote.

The websites were shut down at 5 p.m. Thursday, a DNAinfo source told Patch. The DNAinfo staff were not given advance notice of the shutdown, several sources said, with an email being sent to coincide with the sites going down.

The editorial staff across all DNAinfo and Gothamist sites consisted of 115 journalists, the New York Times reported.

"We couldn’t have done all this without the help of the Writers Guild of America, East, and we hope that our experience underscores the importance for writers and journalists everywhere to unite and stand up for their rights," the DNAinfo/Gothamist bargaining committee said Monday in a statement.

Lead photo of Joe Ricketts by Kris Connor/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images