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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.
These newspapers were already losing money. He was paying for them out of his personal wealth. Forming a union is going to drive costs up, not down. They basically wanted to take more money out of his pocket. I would have closed them also.
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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The "best part" is that these blogs filled with innuendo, incorrect information, and metric-tons of bias are done by hobbyists. Brilliant!
I'm not ready yet to permanently divide the world into billionaires and hobbyists, though I can almost see this day coming in my lifetime.
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.
Yeah, that's my complaint with them, too. The quality is often total crap, and the bias is thick and obvious. The articles are less about journalism and reporting the facts than they are editorials pushing a narrative or agenda. Some of them are so bad that they make /. look good!
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.
There's some debate already whether Joe Ricketts violated labor laws.
What labor law would that be? As you say, he can prove that the entire venture was loosing money. He closed it all down. You think that, just because the employees voted to unionize, the NLRB can force a company to remain open? It would be one thing if he fired all the employees and hired new ones. If he simply winds down the entire company, there isn't much a lawsuit is going to do.
Now. Anybody else who still has a job--do you want a union?
I've only had experience with a unionized position three times. All three times I was screwed over by nepotism, organizational politics and either lies or incompetence by the union reps. So no, no union for me thank you.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
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."
We still have government funded news sites. The BBC and Al-Jazeera both do good work. They might be under pressure to not report negatively on their patron but there are enough of them (with different patrons) to fill in the gaps. The TV networks once funded news sites as a status thing because news isn't profitable.
It's often difficult to pivot with a business and failure to do so is why we are seeing businesses go under today. Local reporting doesn't have to die- but the business model local news papers have relied on may need to be replaced or otherwise adapted to make it work financially. I'm involved exclusively in reporting on local news in New Hampshire. I film important issues at the state house regularly, police abuse (which you'll NEVER see stock reporters doing, not on the street anyway), unconstitutional police check points, local politics, businesses, corruption, and similar. How many stories have you written that have gone viral? From sleeping cops to riots we've covered it and major intentional press swarmed in because of the work I've involved in. Stuff that would have never been reported on if not for a working local news business model.
Let's not forget NPR and PBS.
Although the average "advocate" seem to think they're only worth the 5% of of their operating cost (the part the government actually pays for).
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
My hobby is being a billionaire, you insensitive clod!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
see if I can get my IQ down under 40. I'm already stupid.
If your brain activity was any lower, doctors would legally be able to harvest your organs.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
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" 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.
By long enough, you mean the what, 6 months, less I think, since he bought Gothamist? Which ran for a decade before that?
> The "best part" is that these blogs filled with innuendo, incorrect information, and metric-tons of bias are done by hobbyists. Brilliant!
In other words, they're just like CNN and Fox News.
What's sad, is that the best coverage of U.S. news seems to come from the UK. The Mail, the Telegraph, the Beeb, and, occaisionally, the Guardian , , ,
The BBCs news site has gone drastically down hill in recent years - it used to be my go-to site, but their recent design update basically reduced actual news content on the front page to around 30% of content. The rest of the space is taken up with "most read", "most watched" lists (both 10 item lists, which are styled to take up the same space as the news content blocks around them), "Full Story" magazine style human interest, which has an equal space dedicated to it as the top news block, "Must See" content promotion, again given equal space etc etc.
The amount of actual *news* on the front page has been reduced from 100% to less than a third.
Their new design has also pushed the "breaking news" ticker to a 10% overlay at the bottom of the screen, which requires interaction to dismiss and nearly always links to a story stub which just consists of the story title.
Also, a lot of the magazine content they push doesn't actually work on mobile due to the fancy page designs - a lot of the Travel and Future articles have their centrepiece content missing with just the lead in article stub showing - an example here , just view it on an iPad or something: http://www.bbc.com/travel/stor...
Oh, and the fucking survey overlay, which I get (and dismiss) multiple times a day. I've answered the survey multiple times, and yet there is no way to dismiss it permanently.
The BBC News site *sucks* these days - I'm gradually moving to other sites, it's only habit which makes me load the BBC site.
Look at the sarcastic idiot with a proper name. As usual, the right wing conflates the minor inaccuracy of the major media with the major inaccuracies of the non-major media and tries to draw moral equivalence. I don't know whom to be more disgusted with - idiot right winger here or the morons who modded him up.
By your "news has to be perfect or it's all crap" standard, why should we take time to find out facts at all? Which, of course is the point of your rant - to promote and perpetuate the ignorance of the American populace so people will vote for your side.
That is all.
There's an old adage - "Facts are reported; news is produced." You might want to try to comprehend the subtle difference between the two.
The original Wonkette wasn't fired. Gawker's site made her so famous that she landed a book deal, and left the site to focus on promoting her book-writing career.
I agree with that the style of Gawker's blogs - Valleywag was another one of them - was extremely entertaining while also being informative with occasional bursts of actual investigative journalism.
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.
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.