DNAinfo Chicago, Chicagoist and others shut down over unionization vote
Back on Tuesday, October 31, Robert Feder reported that Linze Rice, DNAinfo Chicago's reporter for Edgewater, Rogers Park and West Ridge, left the company. I immediately went to check the site's careers page. Her leaving the company, I reasoned, created an opening, and an opportunity to have a full-time journalism job covering a neighborhood where I live (and other nearby areas) seemed too good to pass up. I mean, I applied not once, but twice before, but maybe first time would be a charm.
The careers page had nothing, which, I thought, was pretty strange. I figured I would e-mail one of the editors directly.
As I've often written on this LJ and elsewhere, our lives would be so much better if we could recognize foreshadowing.
On Thursday evening, I was coming back from a long, grueling day of covering City Council budget meeting. I plopped down on the bed without even checking e-mails, and didn't wake up until 6:00 AM next day. Which is the only reason why I missed the report that Joe Ricketts, CEO and Founder of DNAinfo New York (the site that started it all), DNAinfo Chicago and the sites in the Gothamist network (including Chicagolist), which he bought back in March, shut down the whole thing.
It has been no secret that DNAinfo Chicago hasn't been profitable. By the sound of things, its New York counterpart wasn't either. I'm not sure about Chicagoist and other Gothamist sites - they have often been touted as early local digital media pioneers, and they made money before, but I'm honestly not sure if that's still the case now. And I've commented before, on this blog and elsewhere, that I didn't think that Ricketts was going to keep propping up DNAinfo forever. So the shutdown, while sudden, wasn't entirely surprising.
But that didn't diminish the fact that it turned out that the straw that broke the camel's back was DNAinfo New York staff's decision to unionize. Given Ricketts' vocal opposition to said effort, and the fact that he was on record opposing unions in general...out of all the reasons to pull financial support, this has to be one of the pettiest possible.
For all my talk about knowing how to recognize foreshadowing, at appeared that the reporters were caught completely off-guard. At least when Wednesday Journal Inc decided to shut down Chicago Journal, I, along with the rest of the freelancers, leaned about it almost a month before the rest of the world did, and the readers got an advance warning, too. There was no attempt to try to sell DNAinfo/Gothamist elsewhere - it was just shut down. I mean, the site is still up, but who knows for how long.
DNAinfo Edgebrook-Sauganash paper archive at Edgebrook Branch Library
This is a disaster for Chicago journalism. Not one, but two media outlets were shut down, leaving staffers out of work and making freelance opportunities all the scarcer. New York City has way more media outlets than Chicago does, but I imagine having two media outlets closed over there hurt, too. Ditto, to some extent or another, other Gothamist communities. Even in New York, I don't think there are many media outlets eager to snatch up the suddenly unemployed journalists.
Per Feder, employees will get "three months of paid “administrative leave” at their full salaries, plus four weeks of severance," which is more than I got from Chicago Journal or Voyager Media... but that's only going to last for so long.
And the loss of DNAinfo will hurt residents' ability to get news. Even if DNAinfo Chicago never quite pulled off the "reporter in every neighborhood" concept, it still did a lot of great reporting, both on neighborhood-based and city-wide level, delivering news that mattered to people who live in the city. While some reporters covered beats community newspapers covered already, others covered neighborhoods that haven't had community newspapers in years, if not decades. The reporters worked hard, they pursued stories that deserved to be brought into light. And it isn't like there is a way to bring that back. As I've written before, digital-only media outlets, especially neighborhood-focused ones, struggle to make money even more than their print counterparts (I mean, say what you will about papers like Austin Weekly News or Niles Bugle, but i can cobble together enough money to keep a roof over my head and put food on the table. I don't know if the same trick would've worked if I wrote for, say, Edgeville Buzz)
Which, of course, brings us, once again, to the whole lose-lose dilemma that faces print newspapers, especially more local ones - the print advertising/subscription revenue is dropping to some extent or another, and digital revenue doesn't come anywhere close to replacing it. DNAinfo started out 100% digital and wound up putting out monthly 4-6 page newspaper newspapers, but that didn't seem to help it any. Digital media giants like Vice and Buzzfeed benefit from tons of investment capital, and it's not entirely clear whether they would be able to stand on their own. New York TImes has been making up for loss of print through digital subscriptions, but we are taking about a newspaper of international stature, one of the biggest newspapers in North America, if not the world. There is no way to replicate that on smaller scale. Daily Line and Daily Whale seem to work by offering subscriber-only access to municipal government reporting, but those subscriptions are not cheap. That isn't the problem for them - they are specifically geared towards, lobbyists, attorneys, developers and other people who are willing to spend money on that sort of thing - but nobody would be willing to pay that much for community news.
In a recent blog post, Darryl Holliday, one of DNAinfo Chicago's original reporters and co-founder of City Bureau non-profit media outlet, suggested that the future is in outlets like his - news organizations that rely on multiple donors and grants to stay afloat. There is something to that. Aside from City Bureau, there's ProPublica. Both specialize in in-depth investigative journalism, but in a more general sense. "Please donate us money to write about corruption in Chicago" is an easier pitch than "please donate us money to cover community meetings in Sauganash." Please know what Chicago is, even if in general terms. Not even all of Chicagoans know what Sauganash is.
Knoxville Mercury, an alternative newspaper that tried to fill the void left by the shuttering of [Knoxville] Metro Pulse. They did fundraising and events, tried to attract advertising... But donations only went so far, and the paper shut down.
I'm not entirely pooh-poohing the idea. Maybe there is a way to do it through some Patreon-type set-up, or through cheaper subscriptions. I think it's worth trying something. People care about community news - DNAinfo Chicago's comment section was a testament to that.
And Holliday was definitely right about one thing. Relying one one billionaire's generosity is a fool's errant. Because, what a wealthy patron giveth, a wealthy patron can just as easily take way.
The careers page had nothing, which, I thought, was pretty strange. I figured I would e-mail one of the editors directly.
As I've often written on this LJ and elsewhere, our lives would be so much better if we could recognize foreshadowing.
On Thursday evening, I was coming back from a long, grueling day of covering City Council budget meeting. I plopped down on the bed without even checking e-mails, and didn't wake up until 6:00 AM next day. Which is the only reason why I missed the report that Joe Ricketts, CEO and Founder of DNAinfo New York (the site that started it all), DNAinfo Chicago and the sites in the Gothamist network (including Chicagolist), which he bought back in March, shut down the whole thing.
It has been no secret that DNAinfo Chicago hasn't been profitable. By the sound of things, its New York counterpart wasn't either. I'm not sure about Chicagoist and other Gothamist sites - they have often been touted as early local digital media pioneers, and they made money before, but I'm honestly not sure if that's still the case now. And I've commented before, on this blog and elsewhere, that I didn't think that Ricketts was going to keep propping up DNAinfo forever. So the shutdown, while sudden, wasn't entirely surprising.
But that didn't diminish the fact that it turned out that the straw that broke the camel's back was DNAinfo New York staff's decision to unionize. Given Ricketts' vocal opposition to said effort, and the fact that he was on record opposing unions in general...out of all the reasons to pull financial support, this has to be one of the pettiest possible.
For all my talk about knowing how to recognize foreshadowing, at appeared that the reporters were caught completely off-guard. At least when Wednesday Journal Inc decided to shut down Chicago Journal, I, along with the rest of the freelancers, leaned about it almost a month before the rest of the world did, and the readers got an advance warning, too. There was no attempt to try to sell DNAinfo/Gothamist elsewhere - it was just shut down. I mean, the site is still up, but who knows for how long.
DNAinfo Edgebrook-Sauganash paper archive at Edgebrook Branch Library
This is a disaster for Chicago journalism. Not one, but two media outlets were shut down, leaving staffers out of work and making freelance opportunities all the scarcer. New York City has way more media outlets than Chicago does, but I imagine having two media outlets closed over there hurt, too. Ditto, to some extent or another, other Gothamist communities. Even in New York, I don't think there are many media outlets eager to snatch up the suddenly unemployed journalists.
Per Feder, employees will get "three months of paid “administrative leave” at their full salaries, plus four weeks of severance," which is more than I got from Chicago Journal or Voyager Media... but that's only going to last for so long.
And the loss of DNAinfo will hurt residents' ability to get news. Even if DNAinfo Chicago never quite pulled off the "reporter in every neighborhood" concept, it still did a lot of great reporting, both on neighborhood-based and city-wide level, delivering news that mattered to people who live in the city. While some reporters covered beats community newspapers covered already, others covered neighborhoods that haven't had community newspapers in years, if not decades. The reporters worked hard, they pursued stories that deserved to be brought into light. And it isn't like there is a way to bring that back. As I've written before, digital-only media outlets, especially neighborhood-focused ones, struggle to make money even more than their print counterparts (I mean, say what you will about papers like Austin Weekly News or Niles Bugle, but i can cobble together enough money to keep a roof over my head and put food on the table. I don't know if the same trick would've worked if I wrote for, say, Edgeville Buzz)
Which, of course, brings us, once again, to the whole lose-lose dilemma that faces print newspapers, especially more local ones - the print advertising/subscription revenue is dropping to some extent or another, and digital revenue doesn't come anywhere close to replacing it. DNAinfo started out 100% digital and wound up putting out monthly 4-6 page newspaper newspapers, but that didn't seem to help it any. Digital media giants like Vice and Buzzfeed benefit from tons of investment capital, and it's not entirely clear whether they would be able to stand on their own. New York TImes has been making up for loss of print through digital subscriptions, but we are taking about a newspaper of international stature, one of the biggest newspapers in North America, if not the world. There is no way to replicate that on smaller scale. Daily Line and Daily Whale seem to work by offering subscriber-only access to municipal government reporting, but those subscriptions are not cheap. That isn't the problem for them - they are specifically geared towards, lobbyists, attorneys, developers and other people who are willing to spend money on that sort of thing - but nobody would be willing to pay that much for community news.
In a recent blog post, Darryl Holliday, one of DNAinfo Chicago's original reporters and co-founder of City Bureau non-profit media outlet, suggested that the future is in outlets like his - news organizations that rely on multiple donors and grants to stay afloat. There is something to that. Aside from City Bureau, there's ProPublica. Both specialize in in-depth investigative journalism, but in a more general sense. "Please donate us money to write about corruption in Chicago" is an easier pitch than "please donate us money to cover community meetings in Sauganash." Please know what Chicago is, even if in general terms. Not even all of Chicagoans know what Sauganash is.
Knoxville Mercury, an alternative newspaper that tried to fill the void left by the shuttering of [Knoxville] Metro Pulse. They did fundraising and events, tried to attract advertising... But donations only went so far, and the paper shut down.
I'm not entirely pooh-poohing the idea. Maybe there is a way to do it through some Patreon-type set-up, or through cheaper subscriptions. I think it's worth trying something. People care about community news - DNAinfo Chicago's comment section was a testament to that.
And Holliday was definitely right about one thing. Relying one one billionaire's generosity is a fool's errant. Because, what a wealthy patron giveth, a wealthy patron can just as easily take way.