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DNAinfo and Gothamist Are Shutting Down
- CPLX 9y agoA week after they voted to unionize. And they actually took down the entire archives, thousands and thousands of well reported stories. This is a special kind of fucked up.
- edward 9y agoIt is on the Wayback Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/*/sfist.com http://web.archive.org/web/*/sfist.com
- notatoad 9y agoIt sounds like the same publisher is shutting down a bunch of non-unionized publications as well, so maybe not related.
- notatoad 9y agowell, now they've admitted it's union-related. so much for giving them the benefit of the doubt.
- TuringNYC 9y agoSo what typically happens in this situation? Does a new company form, buy up the assets of the shut-down companies and re-start with new, un-unionized workers?
- FLGMwt 9y agoThis is very disappointing. DNAinfo Chicago was the best source for neighborhood coverage. I'm sad and more than a little bit outraged on behalf of the staff and reporters. Sorry all :(
- cozzyd 9y agoAgreed. Way better than the Tribune, which seems to be more for suburbanites.
- mortenjorck 9y agoSuburbanites and sports fans. This may be a somewhat unfair characterization, but the Tribune has for some time felt to me like a sports paper with additional sections on business and local news.
- notyourday 9y agoExcept that no one wanted to pay for it.
- robtaylor 9y agoThis is cultural vandalism driven by spite.
- notyourday 9y agoNot really. I could never figure out how the hell do they make money. Their ads were crap. They begged for interns to come to work for them for free in both publishing (writing) and sales. Sponsored content posts were garbage. If you looked at the comments you realized that the active user base would have problem paying $12 for lunch. Tech stack was garbage. And it had way too many people who were drawing salaries.
- Alex3917 9y agoGiven that it's illegal to retaliate against employees for unionizing, would shutting down the business entirely in response to unionization trigger legal liability?
- eli 9y agoNo shutting down the whole business is the one legal form of retaliation
- compsciphd 9y agosee link I posted above. not quite simple.
- theyregreat 9y agoThere is more than one legal form of union-busting. They could’ve reorganized departments and “eliminated positions,” but instead they chose to throw everyone out on the street as collective punishment to send a message. This is why reporters need to form independent, co-op, subscribers-funded news in order to avoid the strings and slavery of corporate advertisers and exploitative owners. Corporate news doesn’t work.
- malandrew 9y agoThese reporters are always free to start their own blog, alone or collectively.
- anigbrowl 9y agoSure, it's not like a new business has any operating expenses or cashflow requirements.
- notyourday 9y agoSo DNAinfo owners should run an unprofitable business but the reporters should not?
- aaronbrethorst 9y agoOne week after employees voted to unionize.
- masterleep 9y agoWhen your company loses money every month and is being kept afloat by a single rich guy, probably unwise to vote for the union.
- notyourday 9y agoDon't tell it to people who don't keep copies of what they write.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- locopati 9y agoA guy who has more money than he could ever spend in a dozen lifetimes. He could have kept these afloat indefinitely while trying to find a workable business model. This was pure spite and greed. He probably has no problem working with other wealthy people to bring benefits to wealthy people, yet he has a problem with his own workers, trying to join together to represent themselves. It says a lot about where we are as a culture that we need to place the delicate feelings of a man who's every material need and more is catered to while ignoring the needs (food, shelter, health care, etc) of his workers.
- losteverything 9y agoAnd this.. The websites' archives have also been completely wiped, leaving no trace of past articles. There should be clear outrage!
- Sangermaine 9y agoThis is retaliation for the staff unionizing. The wiping is a petty final insult to try to deprive them of even their body of work.
- reaperducer 9y agoMaybe. Or perhaps the potential unionization was the straw that broke the camel's back at an operation that was already hemorrhaging money. I can see someone running some projections in a spreadsheet of how much unionization would cost the company, which was already losing money, and someone else deciding it's just not worth it anymore.
- SapphireSun 9y agoIf unions can see the budget sheet and negotiate accordingly, they wouldn't kill the company. They want to keep their jobs, this is nonsense.
- malandrew 9y agoWhy should unions get to see the budget and negotiate? It's not their business and they aren't entitled to that information. If they don't think their salary is fair, they can always seek work elsewhere.
- SapphireSun 9y agoCongrats, you just added one more nail in the coffin of capitalism.
- 9y ago
- kevinburke 9y agoAt some point someone who was not billionaire owner Joe Ricketts had to actually type the commands into the website to entirely remove the old content. I don't think that person should have done that, especially because the writers rely on those clips to show new employers to get hired. At the very least that person should have pushed back and allowed writers a week or more to download their best articles to show to new employers. We need to think pretty hard as an industry about the ethics of the things we are doing and the consequences of our actions on the real world.
- reaperducer 9y ago>the writers rely on those clips to show new employers to get hired. The writers will have their own copies of their clips. Nobody in their right mind would rely on a (potentially ex-) employer as a perpetual source of their material. Radio reporters save MP3's. TV reporters save DVDs (and sometimes mp4s). Newspaper reporters save PDFs. These journalists should have done the same.
- kevinburke 9y agoMy Twitter feed, which has in the past hour seen a few examples of writers lamenting the fact they don't have clips to show new employers, seems to contradict this point.
- JoshMnem 9y agoSend them to archive.org. https://web.archive.org/web/20160428013428/gothamist.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160428013428/gothamist.com/
- smelendez 9y agoI'm a freelance journalist. I've done occasional work for Gothamist over the years, mostly interactive maps and data visualizations. Everyone I ever met or worked with from Gothamist or DNAInfo was great, and I'm really sorry to hear this news. Archiving digital content isn't trivial. A lot of Gothamist pieces are more than just text and static photos. I actually just sent out a query letter to a publication last week where I included a clip from Gothamist. It included an interactive map built with the Google API--pretty simple to build, thanks to Google's hard work, and it was easy for Gothamist to host on their own servers and iframe in to their CMS. But it's not easy to archive the whole package offsite. A PDF of the page isn't ideal if I'm selling my ability to deliver a feature with interactivity. Showing the map on its own isn't the same as showing the complete package. I could mirror Gothamist's page on my own hosting, but that raises various issues, and I'd need to take out stuff like their ad and tracking code and hope nothing breaks. (The Internet Archive versions don't work, for whatever reason). I have the technical skill to deal with that, and in my case I have other clips that show the same abilities so I'll probably just not bother. But I'm sure there are many other journalists, many of them more talented than I am but with different skillsets, who will struggle to archive stories with embedded video, photo slideshows, audio, JS quizzes, etc.
- chasing 9y agoDoing this right after your employees unionize makes you an asshole. Especially if you're a billionaire. Especially if you delete the archives. But. He's a Trump supporter. So he's probably firmly of the belief that the little people are trying to steal too much out of the pockets of the wealthy. (I'm also curious exactly what "good journalism" means to him, because a lot of "good journalism" coming from that side of the fence isn't "good jounrnalism" in the traditional sense of the phrase.) I hope the journalists involved can build themselves something new. And I hope this doesn't cool future attempts to unionize.
- leereeves 9y ago> after he originally sought to prevent [Trump's] nomination during the primaries. Trump targeted Ricketts on Twitter before Ricketts offered his support. Probably not an enthusiastic supporter.
- thinkpad20 9y agoI suppose some of us don't have to be enthusiastic to donate a million dollars...?
- leereeves 9y agoThat's, what, 0.1% of his net worth? That's like an average family donating $100.
- sctb 9y ago> He's a Trump supporter. So he's probably... This sort of thing is a sign that what follows won't meet Hacker News' bar for substantiveness and flamebait-eschewance. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- theyregreat 9y agoThanks, dad. In the meantime, the GP’s not “alt-facts” remain the apolitical reality of the rich vs. poor.
- reustle 9y agoFortunately, the Internet Archive seems to have collected most of the Gothamists articles (eg https://web.archive.org/web/20170902102617/http://gothamist.com/2017/08/29/stuffed_ice_cream_nyc.php https://web.archive.org/web/20170902102617/http://gothamist....) It was such a great resource when I lived in NYC, it will be missed.
- Apreche 9y agoWhere the hell do we get local NYC news from now?
- TroubleTicket 9y agoGoogle to the rescue: https://www.google.com/search?q=new+york+city+local+news&oq=new+york+city+local+news https://www.google.com/search?q=new+york+city+local+news&oq=...
- TuringNYC 9y agoGoogle Search just shows you what is out there. There is now less material out there.
- katedye 9y agoIt doesn't really support the theory that billionaires create jobs... On a more serious note, this was clearly anti-union. But there is some truth to the claims about profitability. I don't know if DNAinfo was profitable or not, but I'm not surprised their margins were thin. There are huge differences in tech adoption in publishing. A site like the Washington Post with a strong tech influence (i.e. bezos money) has an incredibly advanced ad tech stack and optimize the programmatic advertising market. They probably have complex models that price their ads based on historical data and user information, and they've begun to productize their CMS. Whereas publishers that rely on direct sales with brands struggle to stay afloat and without a decent-sized dev team, profitability can be a distant dream.
- look_lookatme 9y agoDNAinfo was never profitable in its 8 year existence. With the union taking root it was probably never going to see a return. In my opinion the only unethical thing here was taking down the archives. Total severance seemed fine.
- berberous 9y agoWhat about Gothamist? I would bet it was profitable since it was run independently for a long time. It was a glorified blog — lots of reprinting Post articles rather than the independent reporting that DNA Info did, so I imagine it had much lower costs.
- rexf 9y agoThis tweet by someone who appears to have written for Gothamist claims that "Gothamist actually WAS profitable. DNAInfo wasn't." https://twitter.com/lindsayism/status/926201373858856962 https://twitter.com/lindsayism/status/926201373858856962
- katedye 9y agoThey could have sold to a company that would have overhauled their monetization, but you're right that it isn't _unethical_ to shut-down (unnecessary, maybe).
- subpixel 9y agoIf I were Craig Newmark I would launch a DNAinfo clone in every market where Craigslist revenues support it. I suspect that would be dozens of cities. In fact, I think I'd sort of feel like that was my responsibility, having killed the classified business that allowed local newspapers to fund quality local reporting. This has done perhaps more harm than is realized: "You can draw a straight line from the decline of local journalism to our current political morass. It’s as plain as the nose on your face." https://twitter.com/lpolgreen/status/926204411789049860 https://twitter.com/lpolgreen/status/926204411789049860
- subculture 9y agoReminds me when Gawker went down and Tom Scocca wrote: Gawker always said it was in the business of publishing true stories. Here is one last true story: You live in a country where a billionaire can put a publication out of business. A billionaire can pick off an individual writer and leave that person penniless and without legal protection. If you want to write stories that might anger a billionaire, you need to work for another billionaire yourself, or for a billion-dollar corporation. The law will not protect you. There is no freedom in this world but power and money. http://gawker.com/gawker-was-murdered-by-gaslight-1785456581 http://gawker.com/gawker-was-murdered-by-gaslight-1785456581