DNAinfo and Gothamist Are Shutting Down(nytimes.com)
nytimes.com
DNAinfo and Gothamist Are Shutting Down
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/nyregion/dnainfo-gothamist-shutting-down.html
82 comments
A 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.
And they actually took down the entire archives, thousands and thousands of well reported stories.
This is a special kind of fucked up.
So 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?
It is on the Wayback Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/*/sfist.com
This is cultural vandalism driven by spite.
Not 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.
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.
Given that it's illegal to retaliate against employees for unionizing, would shutting down the business entirely in response to unionization trigger legal liability?
Employers' right to shut down entire business for antiunion motive upheld by SCOTUS in Textile Workers of America v. Darlington Mills (1965)
Are there any conditions on that? Could they take all the data/IP/etc and open up under another name?
No shutting down the whole business is the one legal form of retaliation
There 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.
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.
These reporters are always free to start their own blog, alone or collectively.
Sure, it's not like a new business has any operating expenses or cashflow requirements.
So DNAinfo owners should run an unprofitable business but the reporters should not?
Profit, startup capital, and cash flow are quite different things. I don't believe that Joey Rickett's decision was a coincidence motivated by pure fiscal math either.
If it was profitable, others can do it themselves. Plenty of bank loans available.
If it wasn't profitable, then the owner was essentially donating money until now and this whole thing would've ended even sooner under other conditions.
If it wasn't profitable, then the owner was essentially donating money until now and this whole thing would've ended even sooner under other conditions.
see link I posted above. not quite simple.
old, but relevant http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...
Wow. It's rulings like this that have driven jobs to other countries. You should always have the option to legally shutter your business and liquidate its assets.
Members of the union would then be free to collectively band together and purchase such assets if made available for sale as a whole.
Members of the union would then be free to collectively band together and purchase such assets if made available for sale as a whole.
One week after employees voted to unionize.
When your company loses money every month and is being kept afloat by a single rich guy, probably unwise to vote for the union.
And this..
The websites' archives have also been completely wiped, leaving no trace of past articles.
There should be clear outrage!
The websites' archives have also been completely wiped, leaving no trace of past articles.
There should be clear outrage!
This is retaliation for the staff unionizing. The wiping is a petty final insult to try to deprive them of even their body of work.
Maybe. 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.
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.
If unions can see the budget sheet and negotiate accordingly, they wouldn't kill the company. They want to keep their jobs, this is nonsense.
Why 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.
I don't see the problem.
If companies get bigger, they get more specialized people.
When you got 3 people, the dev is probably also the admin and the tech support, if you got 30 you get multiple people for each job.
It's only logical to get some specialized people (the leaders of the union) to negotiate salaries, while the rest of the the workforce does their work.
Sure, if you see the companies success independent from the employees success this doesn't make much sense, but if you see the both entangled, why shouldn't this be okay?
If companies get bigger, they get more specialized people.
When you got 3 people, the dev is probably also the admin and the tech support, if you got 30 you get multiple people for each job.
It's only logical to get some specialized people (the leaders of the union) to negotiate salaries, while the rest of the the workforce does their work.
Sure, if you see the companies success independent from the employees success this doesn't make much sense, but if you see the both entangled, why shouldn't this be okay?
Why not? They do most of the work,maybe they should have the opportunity to chime in on how the business is run. Maybe they might actually be able to offer positive suggestions. So yes, it is to some extent their business.
Congrats, you just added one more nail in the coffin of capitalism.
No worries. Socialism's coffin was nailed shut and buried long ago.
Wait, you think people shouldn't negotiate their salary?
They are welcome to negotiate salary. They aren't welcome to private information that isn't theirs such as the company budget.
"My precious!"
You seem terrified of the idea that they might choose to negotiate as a group for some reason, even when they go about that in a perfectly voluntary fashion.
You seem terrified of the idea that they might choose to negotiate as a group for some reason, even when they go about that in a perfectly voluntary fashion.
Pretty unlikely that they were completely bankrupt to the point where they couldn't afford the hosting bill for even another day.
Nevermind that leaving the archives up while not paying writers would generate ad revenue at very low cost in the short term. Instead now they have to refund advertisers with incomplete campaigns.
Nevermind that leaving the archives up while not paying writers would generate ad revenue at very low cost in the short term. Instead now they have to refund advertisers with incomplete campaigns.
At 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.
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.
OK looks like they may put the archives back up
https://twitter.com/andylocal/status/926226031081672709
the fact this is so ham-handed might mean the regular IT employees weren't part of it? I can't remember if we even had anything more than contractors for IT stuff at Ist (I worked there), I do know the CMS was a very out of date copy of Movable Type.
Sounds like he fired every single employee on the spot. I can see the logic behind redirecting the site to a static asset when you have nobody to manage it.
I'm not talking about his logic, I'm talking about the logic of the person he asked to remove all of the content. That person was almost certainly an employee who was also laid off.
The content is still in their CMS somewhere. They just redirected the index to a different page. Could have even been someone who didn't work directly at DNAInfo. Ricketts employs a lot of people.
Their announcement is served by Route 53 and CloudFront. If AWS was also hosting their CMS, it could easily be gone now.
It doesn't matter. They still shouldn't have done it.
It's a tough spot. Ethically you can't spend investors' money when it can't benefit them, and you can't incur hosting bills that won't be paid.
Ex Ist employee here. It's strange because why not keep it up and collect ad revenue? I've written for a fair number of publications that are now defunct and almost all still have their websites up because of ad revenue.
[deleted]
>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.
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.
I'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.
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.
I was an editor at Chicagoist for over a year and am also a web developer. I am assisting some fellow employees with getting their stuff downloaded, luckily a lot of it is safe on Wayback Machine. You'd be surprised how many didn't know about that. Newer stuff is harder, I and others are urging them to get it off Google Cache before it's refreshed.
That said, it's still a pain, for example I have to update multiple websites that link to the site and some of my websites are easier to update than others. It will be easy on some of my newer sites but I have an old Drupal blog that now has a lot of broken links and I'm not excited to update it since I no longer really do Drupal.
That said, it's still a pain, for example I have to update multiple websites that link to the site and some of my websites are easier to update than others. It will be easy on some of my newer sites but I have an old Drupal blog that now has a lot of broken links and I'm not excited to update it since I no longer really do Drupal.
My 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.
Send them to archive.org.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160428013428/gothamist.com/
https://web.archive.org/web/20160428013428/gothamist.com/
It's good advice for a lot of people and I know I'm not as systematic about it as I should be. If you, say, write for a company blog, and that company goes out of business, your work may be on archive.org but it may be fragmentary and may be hard to find. And if what you wrote was behind pay or registration walls, it's probably not available.
The writing I did for close to ten years is no longer available on the original source. I have most of it either because I directly saved copies or because it was cross-posted on another site. Nothing malicious here. The company just went out of business and its website went away. That's pretty much how it works.
The writing I did for close to ten years is no longer available on the original source. I have most of it either because I directly saved copies or because it was cross-posted on another site. Nothing malicious here. The company just went out of business and its website went away. That's pretty much how it works.
Doing 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.
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.
> 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
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
Thanks, dad. In the meantime, the GP’s not “alt-facts” remain the apolitical reality of the rich vs. poor.
Hacker News is a place for rational discussion, even between people who disagree. Not snark and hostility.
> Doing this right after your employees unionize makes you an asshole.
No, it doesn't.
Gothamist is not a small coal mining town where workers have all but one choice of an employer. There unions made sense. You don't bunch together, you and your family starve. Here, unionization is an attempt to squeeze more perks and money from their existing employer, simply because it's easier and more comfortable to do than to look for another job.
No, it doesn't.
Gothamist is not a small coal mining town where workers have all but one choice of an employer. There unions made sense. You don't bunch together, you and your family starve. Here, unionization is an attempt to squeeze more perks and money from their existing employer, simply because it's easier and more comfortable to do than to look for another job.
> 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.
Probably not an enthusiastic supporter.
I suppose some of us don't have to be enthusiastic to donate a million dollars...?
That's, what, 0.1% of his net worth?
That's like an average family donating $100.
That's like an average family donating $100.
This 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 :(
I'm sad and more than a little bit outraged on behalf of the staff and reporters. Sorry all :(
Except that no one wanted to pay for it.
Agreed. Way better than the Tribune, which seems to be more for suburbanites.
Suburbanites 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.
Fortunately, the Internet Archive seems to have collected most of the Gothamists articles (eg https://web.archive.org/web/20170902102617/http://gothamist....)
It was such a great resource when I lived in NYC, it will be missed.
It was such a great resource when I lived in NYC, it will be missed.
Where the hell do we get local NYC news from now?
Google to the rescue:
https://www.google.com/search?q=new+york+city+local+news&oq=...
https://www.google.com/search?q=new+york+city+local+news&oq=...
Google Search just shows you what is out there. There is now less material out there.
It 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.
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.
TD Ameritrade doesn't employ anyone? These newspaper jobs also existed until today while being unprofitable the whole time so it's likely the business would've closed even sooner with other owners.
Most pubs are 100% programmatic now, nobody is doing direct deals at small local news sites. And pubs dont need big dev teams for ads, SSPs are cheap and easy or they can use the standard header bidding wrappers. Yield management is always a moving target but not particularly complicated.
Most pubs are 100% programmatic now, nobody is doing direct deals at small local news sites. And pubs dont need big dev teams for ads, SSPs are cheap and easy or they can use the standard header bidding wrappers. Yield management is always a moving target but not particularly complicated.
DNAinfo 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.
What 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.
This 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
They 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).
Opex loses is liability. Company with no opex is an asset.
If 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
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
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