A Billionaire Destroyed His Newsrooms Out of Spite | Hacker News Reader

A Billionaire Destroyed His Newsrooms Out of Spite

nytimes.com

38 pointssmacktoward32 comments

I love guilds. I know the article mixes the term with unions, but they are truly different. For a union the primary weapon is withholding of labor by many (replaceable) individual members. Guilds however do not need large numbers to be powerful. They are composed of skilled (ie: less replaceable) artisans and small businesses, and have power by actually owning and wielding property/capital.

If there were a "software engineers guild" today it would retain the power to withdraw rights to the intellectual property of its members from any company behaving unethically. Much like how guests visiting a home for a party are expected to behave, a guild works with businesses that are well behaved and punishes those that are not. It holds both its members and outsiders wishing to contract with it to ethical standards that our legal system cannot because it is too gray area. Sort of like how one decides not to invite a bad guest over to the home again.

eg: Situations such as FB/Instagram blatantly copying Snapchat features, or Apple sherlocking F.lux with Nightshift while not illegal, could be judged as unethical by members. If unresponsive to pressure to make things right, the guild could respond by withdrawing rights to use its member-owned-IP from the offending company. eg: Imagine certain OSS licenses having a stipulation that one be in "good standing" with the associated guild in order to use it.

It only takes a small number of artisans with property to have quite an arsenal. A guild with just a few of the big names in the OSS community would be formidable. Ageism, monopolies, and many other threats out there easily fall down. Remember: guilds went up against kings in the middle ages and often held their own.

One last thing: Unions do not own common-stock, but guilds certainly do. In fact they would even seek to become majority holders. This aligns interests of the members with company success. Guilds also have to hold members to a very high standard.

There is much more to guilds vs. unions however I'll stop there. One can dream.

Craftsmanship (and its derivatives) is a long talked about topic. I agree that it would be a great idea (or at least a great experiment).

What we did in the company I work for is create profession-based company-wide guilds. These guilds (that's what we call them too) back their members professionally and make sure their professional progress is not stagnant (among recruitment and consulting). In addition, the guilds keep the LOBs in check. A guild member can "snitch" about a bad practice that their boss is forcing them to do (skip tests in order to hasten the dev process for example). A guild master or the guild leader will then meet with the project leader and hold them in check.

Hopefully this can be cross-company but until then we can do it inside each (medium and up) company.

The article (as opposed to this op-ed) in the Times yesterday was more balanced. [1]

It's probably fair to say that there was spite involved--the timing, the immediate takedown of the sites, etc. But it's also fairly clear that the shutdown was probably going to happen sooner or later in any case. Maybe the unionization was the proverbial straw but I'm not sure how different the end result would have been.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/nyregion/dnainfo-gothamis...

The mixture of cultures here on HN is interesting. There are some very anti-union folks and some very pro-union folks (such as myself).

The article is very opinionated, and I admire that.

I for one think that if a union threatens the viability of your business, then your business model never counted on treating other humans as the vital pieces they are. I am not saddened by the end of such a project (vanity or no), it's simply the natural conclusion of unplanned factors.

There are lot more pro-union people on HN than there used to be.

Not too many years ago any mention of unions on HN would have nearly the entire HN community frothing at the mouth. These days you'll actually find not a few pro-union voices making themselves heard, as in the last article on this subject to make HN's front page:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15616156

It was a Vanity project until the jurnos Unionized, and he did not want to put with that.

Also, he may have other interests who would take his tolerance of his "media" unions as a sign and unionize. To just assigning it to "spite" is narrative bias, in my opinion.

A rational business person would attempt to sell it. They would also keep the websites and content online with advertising systems intact as to allow for some residual revenue. This guy didn't attempt to sell the business and had the websites and archives deleted.

Though I agree that it is spite, the article states that the archives are back up as of now.

> To just assigning it to "spite" is narrative bias, in my opinion.

If a capitalist no longer wants to have anything to do with something he built, the logical thing to do would be to sell it and get some of his $ back. This would also keep the people who helped him build his vanity project employed.

I can't think of a reason to shut it down other than to hurt people.

Given the NLRB issue, I suspect this was already heavily lawyered and gamed out. Not that he's not angry, but he'd already decided the vote would make it a total loss or close enough.

The change in union status may have made it difficult to sell anything ongoing. The biggest asset would be Gothamist's domain name and anyone with that domain was going to have to wade into the labor mess. "Here's an organization running in the red, obligated to negotiate an uncertain new contract with all its employees under NLRB rules! What are my bids?"

Might as well save the auction and lawyer fees and take the loss in 2017.

Spite seems pretty plausible. There’s no evidence that he was going to shutdown the companies prior to the unionization. In fact, he was more than happy to keep it afloat right up until the unionization vote. To say that the two aren’t related, it’s to stretch credulity past the breaking point.

Has anyone tried to run a newspaper as a co-op? If you feel like you can run the organization and are pro employee ownership this seems like the logical progression if you feel cheated out of a job. On the other hand I can understand why anyone who is running an unprofitable business would want to shut it down if it were highly likely that it is going to lose more money in the future.

OTOH, the Gothamist was profitable, so what does that mean?

That means there is unfulfilled demand for a media organization and that someone should be able to fill it. If Joe Ricketts wants to throw money away that is his own prerogative. If I were a former staff member who voted to unionize, I would start a new site and use this momentum as a launching point.

> "DNAinfo was never profitable, but Mr. Ricketts was happy to invest in it for eight years"

Anyone who thinks anyone can be "happy" to "invest" in a non-profitable company for eight years shouldn't be writing articles about business decisions.

Also, this "billionaire" qualifier to make the story more sensational is so cliche.

I think this is a weak op-ed with an argument that’s primarily supported by emotions such as anger.

Nothing is stopping the writers from unionizing. As a union, they can then work for whatever business would like to hire them. It’s not like “The Billionaire” decided to lock the union out, and exclusively employ freelancers. He decided to shut the business down — tough cookies.

You seem to fundamentally misunderstand what a union is, and how they work. Unions are fundamentally tied to a specific employer.

Yeah I agree, the title alone reads to me like my toddler tattling on his brother.

Oh I got it maybe the author prefer an impartial unit that could run the media instead and make sure everything is fair for everyone. Kinda like North Korea! ;-)

Seriously though, the article reads like a bit of frustration and foot stomping.

So a billionaire decided to shut down his 'business', because he didn't want to deal with a union. If your 'business' never makes money and wasn't expected to make money isn't it basically an illegal charity or political organization?

>If your 'business' never makes money and wasn't expected to make money isn't it basically an illegal charity or political organization?

what makes it illegal? i get how it's illegal if it's a charity that's making money, but how is it illegal for a business not to make money?

Journalists shouldn't be demanding higher pay while news revenues are falling across the board and the industry is being inundated with more Communications grads than ever. The economics just don't work out in the ad-block and fake news era.

I don't blame the guy. He was already doing charity work by floating the company. I'm sure he thought that since he was sacrificing money for it, his employees should also make sacrifices and be paid in a commensurate fashion.

As a regular reader of Gothamist, I was very disappointed to hear that they were shutting down. At first, it seemed like so many other stories I've heard: a plucky crew working hard to produce solid journalism getting taken down by the cold, heartless business of online advertising.

After digging into it a bit, I was surprised to find out that it was just like so many other stories I've heard: a group of workers that built a successful business trying to ensure they get to participate in a share of that success, only to be shut out by a ruthless capitalist who can't stand the idea of a union preventing him from hoarding all the gains.

Was it successful? All reports I've seen indicate it was losing money.

Well, from the OP:

> Gothamist, on the other hand, was profitable...

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