DNAinfo and Gothamist news sites shut down on Thursday, just days after voting to join a union, putting hundreds of New York City journalists out of work without notice.
“Today, I’ve made the difficult decision to discontinue publishing DNAinfo and Gothamist. Reaching this decision wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t one I made lightly,” Joe Rickets, founder and former CEO of TD Ameritrade, told staff in a letter published on the now defunct news sites.
Just last week, DNAinfo and Gothamist combined newsrooms, reportedly in the hope of easing financial challenges. Rickets pointed to these same challenges in his decision to shut down the sites and let go of 115 journalists.
The stories that were living on the websites were nowhere to be seen Thursday afternoon. Instead, readers were re-directed to the letter, which went up at 5 p.m, The New York Times reported.
Rickets’ letter went on to say:
I started DNAinfo in 2009 at a time when few people were investing in media companies. But I believed an opportunity existed to build a successful company that would report unbiased neighborhood news and information. These were stories that weren’t getting told, and because I believe people care deeply about the things that happen where they live and work, I thought we could build a large and loyal audience that advertisers would want to reach.
A lot of what I believed would happen did, but not all of it. Today, DNAinfo and Gothamist deliver news and information each day to over half a million people’s email inboxes; we have over 2 million fans across our social channels; and each month, we have over 15 million visits to our sites by over 9 million people. But more important than large numbers of visits and fans, we’ve reported tens of thousands of stories that have informed, impacted, and inspired millions of people. And in the process, I believe we’ve left the world a better place.
But DNAinfo is, at the end of the day, a business, and businesses need to be economically successful if they are to endure. And while we made important progress toward building DNAinfo into a successful business, in the end, that progress hasn’t been sufficient to support the tremendous effort and expense needed to produce the type of journalism on which the company was founded. I want to thank our readers for their support and loyalty through the years. And I want to thank our employees for their tireless effort and dedication.
I’m hopeful that in time, someone will crack the code on a business that can support exceptional neighborhood storytelling for I believe telling those stories remains essential.
