A Billionaire Destroyed His Newsrooms Out of Spite

By HAMILTON NOLAN (former Gawker Editor), 2017-11-03

Reporters, for all their flaws, tend to understand what’s happening in their own newsrooms. It’s their job to try to see things clearly. Often, what they see in their workplaces is low salaries, inept management and poor communication — ills that plague many workplaces across America. For more than two years now, online media outlets have been unionizing as a way to make our industry better. This week, we learned just how horrifying some rich people find the idea of employees coming together to improve their workplace.

Joe Ricketts, the founder of TD Ameritrade whose family owns the Chicago Cubs, is worth more than $2 billion. He is the owner of DNAinfo, a local news site that covered New York City and Chicago with unparalleled skill, as well as Gothamist, a network of city-oriented websites that DNAinfo bought this year. He is also a major right-wing political donor of rather flexible morality. During the last presidential primaries, Mr. Ricketts spent millions of dollars funding ads that portrayed Donald Trump as an untrustworthy, dangerous misogynist. Once Mr. Trump secured the nomination, Mr. Ricketts spent a million dollars to support him.

One might think that such flexibility would allow Mr. Ricketts to bend but not break when faced with every plutocrat’s worst nightmare: a few dozen modestly paid employees who collectively bargain for better working conditions.

Alas, no.

Six months ago, reporters and editors at DNAinfo-Gothamist announced their intent to join the Writers Guild of America, East. This is the union that my colleagues and I at Gawker Media joined in 2015, and the union that has organized major online media companies like HuffPost, Vice Media, Slate and Thrillist in the past two years. In that short amount of time, unionized “new media” workers have won substantial raises, editorial protections and other improvements that writers at more mature companies take for granted. In defiance of the conventional wisdom that unions are outdated, this young, high-tech industry has been one of the most visible recent successes for organized labor in America.

The DNAinfo-Gothamist announcement sparked a zealous anti-union campaign: Management threatened employees by saying that Joe Ricketts might shut the whole place down if it unionized. Nevertheless, employees last week voted 25-2 in favor of unionization. And on Thursday, Mr. Ricketts abruptly shut the whole place down.

It is worth being clear about exactly what happened here, so that no one gets too smug. DNAinfo was never profitable, but Mr. Ricketts was happy to invest in it for eight years, praising its work all along. Gothamist, on the other hand, was profitable, and a fairly recent addition to the company. One week after the New York team unionized, Mr. Ricketts shut it all down. He did not try to sell the company to someone else. Instead of bargaining with 27 unionized employees in New York City, he chose to lay off 115 people across America. And, as a final thumb in the eye, he initially pulled the entire site’s archives down (they are now back up), so his newly unemployed workers lost access to their published work. Then, presumably, he went to bed in his $29 million apartment.

Of all the lies spouted during the DNAinfo-Gothamist anti-union campaign, none was more transparent than a spokeswoman’s assertion that the union was a “competitive obstacle making it harder for the business to be financially successful.” The company never made money before it was unionized, but more important, the new union hadn’t made a single demand yet.

Joe Ricketts himself wrote that “unions promote a corrosive us-against-them dynamic that destroys the esprit de corps businesses need to succeed.” How’s that esprit de corps now, Mr. Ricketts?

Not to lecture these free-enterprise experts on economics, but the idea that employees like those at DNAinfo-Gothamist have any incentive to bankrupt their own employer is ridiculous. They work there. They have a robust incentive to make the workplace better. Their success is tied to the success of the company.

Labor unions have done more for the average American than all the rich industrialists put together. Unions are a legal right and the single most powerful tool that regular working people have to improve their lot. DNAinfo and Gothamist employees, who did the fundamentally important work of telling us all what is happening in our cities, were punished for exercising their rights.

The business of journalism has always been fickle and grim. It is an industry full of idealist workers scrambling to cobble together a living at publications owned by a shifting group of cutthroat capitalists and incompetent rich dilettantes. The careers of most journalists feature constant uncertainty and heartbreak, interspersed with periods of life-affirming work that you hope make it all worthwhile. That uncertainty is why The Los Angeles Times, whose owners have been famously anti-union for more than 100 years, is now in the midst of its own union organizing campaign.

The union movement in media is incredibly important beyond what it means to hundreds of employees at more than a dozen sites. Digital media workers have unionized because they understand how they are being exploited at work, and how to fix it. The visibility of their union campaigns can serve as an example to workers in other job sectors, where organized labor has grown nearly invisible, to the detriment of all.

Just as the newspaper industry unionized in the 1930s to balance out the outlandish power of the publishers, so too will the online news industry unionize whether the bosses like it or not. Mr. Ricketts and other publishers will continue to fight back, framing their opposition to unions as an informed business decision. But it is an ideological one.

Hamilton Nolan is a senior writer at https://splinternews.com/.

Last edited by choad (2017-11-05 00:05:56)

"When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news." - New York Sun editor John B. Bogart (1848–1921)

Taibbi: Edward Herman, co-author of "Manufacturing Consent", dies at 92.

NYTimes: The Advertising & Marketing Solutions Group plans to launch a number of new products and tools out of nytDEMO this year, starting with Project Feels, a data science exploration where the intent is to understand and predict how emotions and engagement connect.

Local News Anchors Are Being Forced to Deliver Pro-Trump Propaganda

...A family of conservative multimillionaires owns Sinclair Broadcast Group. And Sinclair Broadcast Group is on the cusp of owning enough local television stations to reach 70 percent of American households. Every news station under Sinclair’s umbrella is required to syndicate commentary that comports with its owners’ ideological views. Over the past 13 months, this has meant regularly providing viewers with the insights of Sinclair’s chief political analyst, former Trump spokesman Boris Epshteyn. It has also meant featuring analysis from conservative pundit Mark Hyman, and updates from the “Terrorism Alert Desk” (sensationalized coverage of recent terror attacks from around the world) on a routine basis...

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/20 … ganda.html

We should have seen this coming.  First Ted Turner turns TBS into the first national mega-station.  Then it's suddenly OK to own newspapers and TV stations in the same market.  Then Sinclair bought up the Tribune's stations, becoming the most dangerous US company that you've (most people) have never heard of.  This is how Donald Trump gets elected in rural and middle America.

Sarah Huckabee's Cum Socks?

choad wrote:

Baywolfe wrote:

We should have seen this coming.  First Ted Turner turns TBS into the first national mega-station.  Then it's suddenly OK to own newspapers and TV stations in the same market.

You could hear its death knell in the late 70s and early 80s, if you were listening. Smaller market newspapers got hit first, with wave after wave of predatory buyouts roughly coinciding with tech evolution. I could have this wrong but I think it was population density what did it. People no longer knew or much cared where they lived, stopped participating in their communities, and relied on nyc and hollyweird for most of their news and entertainment.

You're not wrong.  I think most of it can be blamed on the glass teat.  Why read when you can absorb?

Reporter.

Baywolfe wrote:

choad wrote:

Reporter.

This is what absolutely throttles me about Trump and his hard-on with the New York Times.  I get that he has no clue what journalistic integrity is and doesn't understand the whole vetting process with multiple sources, but it seems like the whole world's just a TV program to that guy, isn't it?

The NYT has done us all no favors feeding its partisan pandering to the outrage without adding a fucking thing to the discussion.

It’s a shocking thing, to see something as open and vast as the internet become the ultimate weapon of the narrow-minded. Instead of knowing more about the world, people have used the internet to create worlds of their own and fully inhabit them. Facts are incidental, if not detrimental, to these worlds.

The Walls Are Closing In

George Orr wrote:

The Walls Are Closing In

Anyway, I just wanted to point out that it doesn’t have to be like this, while I still can, before this company’s eventual buyer eliminates my job and deletes this post from the internet.

Losing my Voice...


~ click ~

Smudge wrote:

Losing my Voice...

https://s8.postimg.cc/h90wcuic5/The_Vil … .0_640.jpg
~ click ~

Sad, sad, sad.

Matt Taibbi: "Instead of letting Bannon come and perhaps talk himself into a jam, Remnick just handed him an all-time talking point.

Auto-edited on 2020-08-02 to update URLs

TRONC to the Daily News...

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/p … ws-790313/

Auto-edited on 2020-08-02 to update URLs

Not all writing skill has shuffled off this mortal coil. Been digging on https://magazine.atavist.com/ lately. 3 article limit if you can't right click for incognito mode.

It's all Twitter now.  The United States is leading the way against actual press conferences and conducting all policy via Twitter.  Again, I understand that these are all symptoms of the fall of our Republic and not the causes but it's sad never the less.

Baywolfe wrote:

McClatchy, the chain that owns 30 US newspapers including the Miami Herald, The Kansas City Star, The Sacramento Bee, The Charlotte Observer, The News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram has filed for bankruptcy protection.

Saw that earlier, a bit of a gut punch.

A bit late in posting this, but for the record, Pittsburgh is leading the way in not giving people something to read.

Linda Guest, senior HR Manager wrote:

"On June 26, 2018, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette announced its decision to become a digital news organization. (See attached letter). As part of that decision, the Post-Gazette's print operations would be phased out. On August 25, 2018, the Company eliminated two days of print [Tuesdays and Saturdays]. The Union has previously been informed that additional print days will be eliminated in 2019.

"The Company has decided to eliminate two additional print days [Mondays and Wednesdays] on September 30, 2019 as it continues the transition to a digital-only newspaper. . . ."

As one might expect, newswriters were not happy.  This and other shenanigans resulted in a month-long byline strike.

UK Audit Bureau stops publicly reporting some newspaper circulation numbers

The Telegraph, The Sun and The Times declined to publish, but other national titles revealed their figures as normal, including The Daily Express, The Daily Mirror, The Guardian, The Daily Star and The i Paper.

The Daily Mail had the highest sales of the papers which published, with a circulation of 945,000 - down from 1.13 million in March. . . .

After the announcement that some papers would not publish their figures, The Guardian's media editor Jim Waterson said: "This is a genius move. Can't write about the decline in print newspaper sales if there's no longer evidence that print newspaper sales are actually declining!

"Entirely coincidentally, pre-Covid this was due to be the month the Sun lost its title as UK's biggest selling newspaper after 40+ years to Daily Mail. Now we've... no idea," he added.

The totally foreseeable outcome of consolidation

Rupert Murdoch's newspaper business in Australia has said more than 100 of its newspapers will become digital-only or disappear entirely.

From next month it will make 76 regional and local papers online-only and close another 36 altogether.

Choad would have loved this:  Resurrection

They ought to have paid her to take it. It would have cost more to close it.

Putting lipstick on a pig.

The Washington Post is giving its homepage a facelift as it seeks a turnaround
By Brian Stelter, CNN
Updated: 8:00 AM EDT, Mon September 9, 2024
Source: CNN

See Full Web Article

The Washington Post is trying to fix one of its biggest problems: an outdated homepage loathed by its own staff.

The facelift is a key facet of Post publisher and chief executive Will Lewis’s plan to turn around the publication’s fortunes on behalf of owner Jeff Bezos This year the Post is forecast to lose about $50 million, an improvement over last year’s $77 million loss, but still an unsatisfactory result.

Lewis is under pressure to recapture paying subscribers and return the Post to profitability, a goal he says he is making progress on. In his weekly memo to Post staffers on Friday evening, Lewis called the updated homepage an “important step forward.”

Reporters and editors at the news organization have long grumbled about the drab and dated nature of the Post’s digital front door. Among the frustrations: The homepage featured relatively few stories at any given time and lacked a sense of cohesion. Staffers envied the homepages of rivals like The New York Times. Lewis acknowledged as much in his memo.

“Many of you have expressed your dislike of the previous version,” he wrote. “I agreed and encouraged you to improve it and you did just that.”

The new iteration, which launched last week, “is the beginning of several planned enhancements,” newly installed executive editor Matt Murray wrote to the newsroom.

The new homepage has double the amount of space for top stories — six slots instead of three — a muchwelcomed change.

“Section editors had been fighting to get their stories into those three featured slots, leading to a lot of frustration,” a Post reporter explained.

As part of the redesign, Opinion pieces have also been moved higher up on the page, while some sections like “Help Desk” and “Technology” have been dropped. Staffers said they expect further upgrades in the coming months.

Lots of people find Post journalism through side doors, like social media accounts and email newsletters, but the front door has become more important as social networks shut off the traffic firehose and Google integrates A.I. into its search results. More urgently, at the Post, the homepage redesign is a sign that the new management regime is moving quickly to make significant changes.

Earlier this summer, the paper also launched a new marketing campaign playing off its “Democracy Dies in Darkness” slogan with the catchphrase “Switch On,” in a bid to supercharge growth at the newspaper.

Lewis was appointed publisher and chief executive in January and didn’t mince words about the beleaguered state of the Post. His turnaround strategy was welcomed by many staffers, but morale plummeted in the spring when allegations resurfaced about his involvement in a UK phone hacking scandal coverup. (He has denied wrongdoing.)

While Lewis hasn’t entirely recovered, he has used his weekly memos to tout progress in rebuilding the Post’s subscriber rolls. On Friday, Lewis said “last week was our highest net growth week of the year for subscriptions and this ongoing growth is due to great teamwork across the company.”

A Post spokeswoman declined to specify the newspaper’s current number of digital subscribers. The most recent publicized total was 2.7 million.