DNAinfo, Gothamist shut down by CEO

Here's the other thread, also on the front page:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15614310

Personal anecdote: In late 2014 or early 2015 I was looking for work and I had an interview with DNAinfo. One of the first things I asked is what tech stack they were using. The guy told me their whole stack was based around Drupal.

I wasn't desperate for work, I had some freelance contracts, so I felt free to be completely honest with the guy. So I said, "I've got to tell you, the fact that you are using Drupal is a giant red flag to me. You're not going to re-invent journalism using Drupal."

Partly I was thinking of "Twilight of the CMS" which was written way back in 2011, and which should have been a warning to any startup focused on journalism:

http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/talking-points-memo-t...

Partly I was also thinking that whatever company reinvents journalism, it will be using a facts-over-time log as the starting point of the creation of their data, with all consumers of the data drawing from some downstream database where the data was already denormalized. This is the architecture that the New York Times later adopted:

Publishing with Apache Kafka at The New York Times

https://www.confluent.io/blog/publishing-apache-kafka-new-yo...

I briefly tried to sell the guy on this idea, just to see if they were open to changing their architecture. They were not. He very much gave the vibe "PHP programmers are cheap, and we want cheap programmers."

So, I gave DNAinfo a pass. And somehow, I am not surprised that they've run into trouble. I'm not saying that Drupal caused any problems for them, but I would say that the use of Drupal revealed flawed thinking which also affected other parts of the business.