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Old Posted Nov 3, 2017, 4:31 PM
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ithakas ithakas is online now
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Originally Posted by Via Chicago View Post
also, he just acquired Gothamist in May. i mean seriously?
Eh, I think DNAinfo's been hemorrhaging money for a long time. No doubt that Ricketts is a prick who has expressed strong anti-union views, and went about this the wrong way – not informing staff ahead of time, taking down archives without reassuring staff they'd be up again soon – but he's probably been thinking about shuttering for awhile, and this was just the straw that broke the camel's back. Hard to sell an operation that's losing millions a month.

They probably acquired Gothamist to see if there was any way it could turn the company around, and with some months of seeing no obvious path forward realized it wasn't going to save the company. Some are claiming that Gothamist was making money, but no one knows how much, whether it came anywhere close to making up for DNA's losses, and to what extent its margins were thinning out (which they assuredly were).

Ricketts is a prick, but the real pricks are at Facebook and Google, who make more money than God distributing content they don't pay for . Ricketts may have laid off 110 journalists yesterday, but those companies are responsible for the loss of the 40% fewer journalists the country had a decade ago.
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