DNAinfo

» see dnainfo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

dnainfo did not exist for me at the time. it was an nyc and chicago neighborhood news site, a category that does not really translate outside of dense american cities with old-school block-by-block civic infrastructure. i learned about it the way most non-new-yorkers did, on 2 november 2017, when the shutdown letter became the news story.

joe ricketts founded dnainfo in 2009. he was the td ameritrade founder and a billionaire by then, and he wanted a hyperlocal newsroom for new york the way old big-city dailies once had block-by-block coverage before craigslist took the classifieds. the site launched in november 2009 covering manhattan neighborhoods. chicago dnainfo opened in november 2012. the model was loss-leading from day one and ricketts paid for it personally.

in march 2017 dnainfo bought gothamist along with the rest of the "ist" network, folding eight cities into ricketts's wallet. the deal made the combined operation one of the largest local-news outfits in the country. it also stacked the writing staff into a single union target. on 26 october 2017 the gothamist and dnainfo newsroom voted to unionize with the writers guild of america east. one week later, on 2 november, ricketts sent the staff a letter and shut down both sites and the entire network. around one hundred and fifteen people lost their jobs that afternoon.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the day it died ~

the vote was a thursday and the shutdown letter went out the following thursday. the explanation in the letter blamed business economics, not the union vote, but the sequence is on the wikipedia page in one paragraph and that is the version that lasted. the archives went dark almost immediately, leaving years of neighborhood reporting unreachable for months until wnyc public radio bought back the gothamist brand in february 2018 and restored its archive. the dnainfo archive eventually returned as a static read-only mirror, but the brand never reopened.

~ what got rescued ~

the chicago editors started block club chicago independently in the weeks after the shutdown and raised one hundred and eighty-three thousand dollars on kickstarter to do it. they ran a successful subscription model from launch and survived as a working hyperlocal newsroom. gothamist got bought back by wnyc and the writers got mostly rehired under public-radio rules instead of billionaire-owner rules. dnainfo the brand is the only piece that did not come back. the shutdown is what the brand is now known for, which is the inversion of what most news sites get to leave behind.

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