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New Victims in the 'Billionaire War on Journalism' (newsweek.com)
Newsweek offers a new reminder that internet journalism can vanish in a corporate shutdown or be "sued out of existence" -- so it certainly isn't permanent.
Writers at the local New York City news sites DNAinfo and Gothamist -- as well as Gothamist's network of city-specific sister sites, such as LAist and DCist -- learned this chilling lesson on Thursday, when billionaire Joe Ricketts abruptly shut down the publications and fired their employees. The decision has been widely regarded as a form of retaliation in response to the newsroom's vote last week to unionize with the Writers Guild of America, East. Worse, for a full 20 hours after the news broke, Gothamist.com and DNAinfo.com effectively didn't exist: Any link to the sites showed only Ricketts's statement about his decision, which claims the business was not profitable enough to support the journalism...
The larger tragedy is a nationwide death of local news. Alt-weeklies are flailing as ad revenue dries up. The Village Voice, a legendary New York paper, published its final print issue in September. Houston Press just laid off its staff and ended its print edition this week. Countless stories won't be covered, because the journalistic institutions to tell them no longer exist. Who benefits from DNAinfo being shuttered? Billionaires. Shady landlords. Anyone DNAinfo reported critically on over the years. Who loses? Anyone who lives in the neighborhoods DNAinfo and Gothamist helped cover.
The larger tragedy is a nationwide death of local news. Alt-weeklies are flailing as ad revenue dries up. The Village Voice, a legendary New York paper, published its final print issue in September. Houston Press just laid off its staff and ended its print edition this week. Countless stories won't be covered, because the journalistic institutions to tell them no longer exist. Who benefits from DNAinfo being shuttered? Billionaires. Shady landlords. Anyone DNAinfo reported critically on over the years. Who loses? Anyone who lives in the neighborhoods DNAinfo and Gothamist helped cover.
Gawker's pretty well disliked for their tabloid journalism,
It's not just the half-assed bullshit "reporting" that landed Gawker on a lot of people's shit lists. I wrote those assholes off for the stunt that got them banned from the CES, years before they tried to destroy the career of the guy they stole that iPhone prototype from.
Gawker is lucky that Apple didn't crush them like a bug and get a dozen of them tossed in jail for theft and attempted extortion.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
If /. is a victim of anything, it's a victim of the terrible moderation system here that has driven away the best users and contributors. Smart people who provide great comments won't waste their time here when there's a great chance that their high-quality comments will end up at -1 because of the awful moderation here. Now I'm not saying that Reddit or Hacker News are any better. They obviously aren't. The problem here is that /.'s moderation system discourages quality comments, and encourages shitty one-liners that only serve to ruin the discussion here. You know, I wouldn't be at all surprised if this very comment, which is among the best posted so far, gets wrongly downmodded, thus proving this comment to be correct!
I work at a company that is owned by the employees and we are in dire, dire need of a union. The thing is, while employees may have ownership shares held for them in a trust, they have no say in any of the business decisions and the shares of stock function in no way that gives them any votes or power of any kind.
You should tell your managers that they are doing it wrong. Harvard Business School did a study of employee owned companies, and found that they generally outperform competitors, but only if employees participated in decision making and felt involved in setting goals and resolving problems.
You mean the whole 8 months that Joe Ricketts owned the Gothamist LLC? That has been around for 14 years? Yeah he carried them real far.
From TFA:
It takes time and money to do good journalism. It doesn't take that much time or money to publish revenue generating opinion passing as news to make money. It used to be that many news orgs actually cared about good journalism, very few are anymore.
It's foolish to think that news should be profitable, they never were. What makes money and supports good journalism is good entertainment and the big networks chose to skimp on the latter for profit and the whole thing went to shit.
The people on this thread that are obviously against unions forget that most of the benefits you get while employed are the direct result of unions. The unions got to a point of overreaching and misusing their power but for the life of me, I will never understand why so many people choose to believe that a handful of fat cats deserve ALL of the money over majority of people that help them make their riches are not paid a living wage. The more money the "little"people make, the more money the people at the top will have. What we have now is a grotesque caricature of capitalism based on unrestrained greed. It's not sustainable. The greed that has put us where we are today is just stupid.
The employer doesn't pay the union, the employees do. Just, so you know next time.
Do you really believe the things you say? Are you actually convinced that once a news operation's employees unionize that their new collective bargaining arrangement won't increase the payroll overhead for the employer? That's the whole POINT of unionizing - to get more out of the employment arrangement than the employer would otherwise be able or inclined to pay. The costs of unionizing are passed along to the employer (and to the employer's customers), by definition.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
You ... you really believe that one can get rich by working?
Hey, folks, gather 'round, I found the dupe that still believes the "American Dream"!
It seems that among the disadvantages of being an apparently Marxist leaning nihilist is the many extra opportunities it provides to be wrong on so many things on so many levels.
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much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
That's socialism
Nope, it is capitalism. ESOPs require the employees to buy or earn their shares. Once vested, they can sell their shares, either on an exchange or back to the company. Not all employees participate, and of those that do ownership is not equally distributed.
In principle, in is no different than any other stock ownership, and you can't get more capitalist than that.
The only real "socialist" component, is that most ESOPs are part of tax deferred retirement plans, so there is some taxpayer funded subsidy upfront. But most retirement savings are subsidized, so that is nothing special.
That's a nice little homage to the Grauniad ;-)
But proposing the Daily Mail as a news site is a couple of million miles off target.