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.

Comments

Re:Exactly - they already had negative pnl

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Re:What utter bullshit.

[CrashNBrn]

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 was always a strange fit: When Ricketts purchased the 14-year-old Gothamist LLC in March, its flagship website Gothamist quickly decided to delete articles that were critical of its new owner. In recent weeks, the staff took steps to join a union, despite the owner's resistance to the idea. "As long as it’s my money that’s paying for everything," Ricketts wrote in an email to staff in spring, "I intend to be the one making the decisions about the direction of the business.”