DNAinfo and Gothamist Are Shutting Down
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It was such a great resource when I lived in NYC, it will be missed.
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
And they actually took down the entire archives, thousands and thousands of well reported stories.
This is a special kind of fucked up.
I'm sad and more than a little bit outraged on behalf of the staff and reporters. Sorry all :(
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.
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.
Members of the union would then be free to collectively band together and purchase such assets if made available for sale as a whole.
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
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.
https://www.google.com/search?q=new+york+city+local+news&oq=...
The websites' archives have also been completely wiped, leaving no trace of past articles.
There should be clear outrage!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Probably not an enthusiastic supporter.
That's like an average family donating $100.
This sort of thing is a sign that what follows won't meet Hacker News' bar for substantiveness and flamebait-eschewance.
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.