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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.
You want moneylosing local journalism, fund it yourself. Don't expect others to fund it for you.
There are plenty of local blogs out there that cover fairly low-level neighborhood news. They don't have massive readership but I see them shared all over facebook when they publish something interesting. The best part about it is the writers are mostly doing it as a hobby.
Using money to take control of media. It worked for Gawker. Gawker's pretty well disliked for their tabloid journalism, but they did a lot of real journalism on the side and used the tabloid stuff to pay for it. That's why Thiel shut them down. They'd done exposes into some of his dirty dealings in finance (and no, it wasn't because they outed him as gay).
So get used to this. When they can't crush they'll buy and vice versa. If you want the kind of muck racking that shines a light on the bad parts of the world you've got to pay for it somehow. That used to be the tabloids, but folks seem to have forgotten that, and all that's left is corporate propaganda paid for to push their message.
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Please. A guy who's using his personal cash to prop up money-losing city-branded "news" web sites decides that there's no prospect of the operations continuing, especially if his employees decide to install the overhead associated with paying union bosses and having to treat every employee as if they are all equally productive, motivated, resourceful, dedicated, and generally as valuable as the next. So he bows to the inevitable and shuts down to stop the bleeding. The OP, of course, has to spin this as Eeeevil Corporatism and the usual histrionics.
I wonder how the OP feels about the fact that the National Geographic media operation was quickly and spectacularly swirling the toiled and about to fold and take hundreds of jobs with it, without a single white knight showing up to bail them out and fix what was broken, except for (horror! tragedy!) Rupert Murdoch. Now they're back on their feet and solvent and writers, photographers, production people and the rest still have jobs there. Eeeeevil corporatism! Except it wouldn't have been evil if a notably lefty billionaire had used one of his companies to buy NatGeo, in which case that would have been great for journalism and everything else, la la la.
Paying professional people to produce media for an audience is a business. If it can't survive without generous patronage, then it needs to die and be reborn as part of someone's foundation or other personal project, or simply die because it can't produce the value that everyone working there wants to take home every week. Buggy whip factories, etc.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Heard an interview with one of the employees on the radio earlier this week.
The way it was done was a deliberate slap in the face to the employees.
There's some debate already whether Joe Ricketts violated labor laws.
I've no doubt he can show internet journalism isn't profitable. And anyone paying attention in 2008 (when he got into it) knew that, too.
The benefit Joe Ricketts gets from a "newspaper" is a place to shout from and a tax write off. It was never going to be profitable.
It was done a week after writers unionized and the last message shouted from the "newspaper" was crystal fscking clear:
You vote union? We vote scorched earth.
Now. Anybody else who still has a job--do you want a union?
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Just a reminder that 'Freedom of the Press' just means that the government can't officially sensor your speech. It in no way gives you a right to have your voice heard. In practical terms it's not the 'right' for you to have to be give access to an actual printing press or by extension a news paper column, it's just that the government can't keep you from owning one without the due course of law.
If you can't get people to listen to you enough then that's your problem, and complaining about it on Slashdot is more than useless. You might have a case for anti unionizing practices, but that's a different story all together.
Guy is running a newpaper that loses money. A change is put through that will make him lose considerably more money. So he decides it's not worth it. I am shocked.
It seems to me like this is a good opportunity for the former staff to start their own site. If they collectively own their own business then they don't really have need for a union and since the closed down the companies entirely, its not as though only half of the staff got laid off which makes it hard to start a new business due to lack of key people. The only thing that will have changed is that the owner is out of the picture. I'll assume that they probably don't have the capital for an office right away, but they may be able to secure a loan, or probably just work from home until things get up and running.
Joe Ricketts carried those ungrateful, entitled fucks long enough. He has no moral obligation at all to keep paying them when they're not producing.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The news organizations that are more dependent on advertising for their funding tend to be closer to propaganda than news organizations with other funding sources. The ones dependent on advertisers can't really publish anything that might depict those advertisers in a bad light, even in the most minor way. They end up having less freedom, and thus are far more likely to become defenders of their advertisers, rather than objective reporters of fact.
Fuck you. If you want what he's got, get a job and earn it.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Though I guess it's hard to imagine that a left-wing news organization would be biased in favor of other left-wing journalists.
Puh-lease!
Those people will likely quickly land somewhere
Journalism isn't like tech. They have low pay, and no job security. I have met several Uber drivers who tell me that their "real" job is journalism, and they just drive for Uber to pay the bills.
if they're smart, start their own news website.
Sure, because the world needs yet another news aggregator that nobody is willing to pay for.
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"!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"It" happened because "it" didn't really happen and you can't prove it.
You can shut the business down and open a different business later. That part is no problem.
The problem, or lack of problem, comes down to the actual decision to close it and if they left some sort of trail that makes it clear it was shut down over the union. It has nothing to do with if the business was shut down, or if you started a new one; it comes down to why, and what was documented about that question.
Retaliation over labor organizing is illegal, but failing after labor organizes isn't. Nor is trying again later. But shutting them down because labor organizes is illegal. So it depends largely on if he said stupid shit to his employees while trying to talk them out of unionizing. If he said stupid shit he might be screwed. And all I know about the guy is: he's saying stupid shit now, on the same subject.
Funny, I just went to MotherJones.com for the first time in ages. I used to read it in the 1980's a lot. You can look up who owns it, funding, advertising issues, political bias, etc. right on the website. More transparent than most.
(I predict a lot of people will not believe what is asserted on Mother Jones about their political bias).
20 out of 200.000.000?
By that odds, playing the lottery seems more sensible.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.