Every now and again I feel that we need to get a little “newsy” here with The Chronicles and considering the startling developments that happened with the two online news outlets DNAinfo and The Gothamist. If you click on either of these two websites, you will see the following letter. I’ve embedded it for your perusal after the logos. Check it out.

Dear DNAinfo and Gothamist Readers:

Today, I’ve made the difficult decision to discontinue publishing DNAinfo and Gothamist. Reaching this decision wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t one I made lightly.

I started DNAinfo in 2009 at a time when few people were investing in media companies. But I believed an opportunity existed to build a successful company that would report unbiased neighborhood news and information. These were stories that weren’t getting told, and because I believe people care deeply about the things that happen where they live and work, I thought we could build a large and loyal audience that advertisers would want to reach.

A lot of what I believed would happen did, but not all of it. Today, DNAinfo and Gothamist deliver news and information each day to over half a million people’s email inboxes; we have over 2 million fans across our social channels; and each month, we have over 15 million visits to our sites by over 9 million people. But more important than large numbers of visits and fans, we’ve reported tens of thousands of stories that have informed, impacted, and inspired millions of people. And in the process, I believe we’ve left the world a better place.

But DNAinfo is, at the end of the day, a business, and businesses need to be economically successful if they are to endure. And 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. I want to thank our readers for their support and loyalty through the years. And I want to thank our employees for their tireless effort and dedication.

I’m hopeful that in time, someone will crack the code on a business that can support exceptional neighborhood storytelling for I believe telling those stories remains essential.

Sincerely,

Joe Ricketts
Chief Executive Officer

Piercing Ken Thoughts: I will not lie and say that I am not going to miss either of these two resources since I greatly enjoyed them and read each at least three times a week. As a matter of fact, they were often sent to my now out of town retired parental units so I could make them aware of the stuff going on in their old neighborhood. Hey it was easier than repeating it all on the telephone since they are constantly on the move. The interesting thing about this sad news for the outlets fans is the revelation that the staff of each of them had only recently decided to unionize and join the Writers Guild East Of America only days before this shutdown. Talk about a coincidental bit of timing eh? Perhaps someone with deep pockets will pick these two things up and merge them together as something new and greater than the sum of its parts. I wish the creative and technical teams behind these outlets the very best going forward. At the time of this posting, the Official Facebook Pages for these outlets is still online but only time will tell if they remain once this news plays out a little more.

Official Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DNAinfoNewYork/
Official Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Gothamist/