The New York City-based digital publications DNAinfo and Gothamist are shutting down for good, just a week after the combined newsrooms celebrated successfully unionizing.
TD Ameritrade’s billionaire founder Joe Ricketts announced Thursday at 5 p.m. that he was shutting down the two online local news outlets, The New York Times reports.
“Today, I’ve made the difficult decision to discontinue publishing DNAinfo and Gothamist,” Ricketts said in a final post on the outlets’ websites. “Reaching this decision wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t one I made lightly.”
The publications’ unionization factored into the decision.
“The decision by the editorial team to unionize is simply another competitive obstacle making it harder for the business to be financially successful,” a DNAinfo spokesperson told TheNYT in a statement.
Ricketts congratulated the news teams for reporting “tens of thousands of stories that have informed, impacted, and inspired millions of people.”
However, the outlets are businesses that need profits to stay in operation.
“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,” Ricketts said.
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