In sobering news the Old Lady, the New York Times, reports that billionnaire owner Joe Rickets, has shut down popular media site The Gothamist, together with orther sites owned by Ricketts' group.
This comes a week after its employees won a fight to join a union and thus to organise and fight for their rights as a group.
Eventually all sites will disappear from the Internet, breaking thousands and thousands more links or the core of the Internet. We can but hope that the domain owner will not also nuke the sites from the Wayback Machine because that would be even more Internet history erased.
Another proof that online independent media should be blockchain based and thus decentralized.
Mr. Ricketts wrote that he founded DNAinfo in 2009 “because I believe people care deeply about the things that happen where they live and work,” and he thought he could build “a large and loyal audience that advertisers would want to reach.” DNAinfo and Gothamist, which Mr. Ricketts bought in the spring, attracted more than 9 million readers a month, in New York and other cities where they operate satellite sites, DNAinfo said.
But in the financially daunting era of digital journalism, there has been no tougher nut to crack than making local news profitable, a lesson Mr. Ricketts, who lost money every month of DNAinfo’s existence, is just the latest to learn. In New York City, the nation’s biggest media market, established organizations such as The Village Voice, The Wall Street Journal and The Daily News have slashed staff or withdrawn from street-level reporting. The Voice stopped publishing its print edition in September.
For DNAinfo and Gothamist, the staff’s vote to join the Writers Guild of America East was just part of the decision to close the company. A spokeswoman for DNAinfo said in a statement, “The decision by the editorial team to unionize is simply another competitive obstacle making it harder for the business to be financially successful".
Read the whole account over at the New York Times.
Photo credit: Dave Weaver / AP.