At 5 p.m. Thursday, without warning, local news site DCist shutdown, and the DCist website now redirects to a statement from Joe Ricketts, CEO of DNAinfo and Gothamist, the site's parent company.
Ricketts cited an unsustainable business model as the reason for shutting the entire Gothamist and DNAinfo media groups down. All archives of the two sites have also vanished from the internet as all story URLs redirect to Ricketts statement, and content can only be accessed through cached pages or online tools like the Internet Archives' Wayback Machine.
The news came without any warning from the company to readers. Stories and social media posts were coming out of DCist's newsroom up until the shutdown. Editor-in-chief Rachel Sadon tweeted "For once, I truly have no words" as the site went down.
Ricketts' decision comes about one week after the New York City staffs at Gothamist and DNAinfo voted to unionize and join the Writers Guild of America. WGA East said in a statement to Bloomberg that "The Guild will be looking at all of our potential areas of recourse and we will aggressively pursue our new members' rights." As The New York Times reports, 115 journalists worked at the two companies.
DCist's shutdown follows a string of losses for the local D.C. media scene. Washington City Paper is up for sale and it's unclear what will happen if they can't find a buyer. Baltimore's City Paper recently published its last paper, but the staff plans to independently start its own publication, called Baltimore Beat, under the same group that owns Washington Blade. In December, hyperlocal news site Borderstan shutdown.
As the news broke late yesterday, the D.C. community took to Twitter. Here's a look at some of those reactions:
Rachel Sadon, editor-in-chief of DCist
Eleanor Norton, U.S. congresswoman for D.C.
Mayor Muriel Bowser
Martin Austermuhle, reporter at WAMU, former editor-in-chief of DCist
The Council of the District of Columbia
Matt Cohen, arts editor at Washington City Paper, former editor-in-chief of DCist
Alyssa Rosenberg, politics and pop culture commentator at The Washington Post
Chris Geidner, legal editor at BuzzFeed
Sriram Gopal, music writer at DCist
