Owner Joe Ricketts shuttered unprofitable local news sites DNAInfo and Gothamist yesterday. Observers link this closure to a vote last week by New York employees to unionize.
This is an example of the disruption of the local media ecosystem. Technology allowed sites like DNA and Gothamist to exist in the first place, but local news has proven resistant to sufficient monetization to create profitability in most cases.
The loss of local news coverage is a serious issue in communities across the country, and the closure of these sites show that even the largest markets like New York and Chicago are not immune.
The closure of these sites sent waves of anguish rolling across Twitter, vastly disproportionate to the size of the sites or their national importance. There’s something off about this, and Lyman Stone wrote in a tweetstorm:
Sidenote: how many tears will be shed for, according to NYT, <300 jobs [115 jobs]? How did you respond to the Carrier plant in Indiana? I’ll be sad to see these sites gone, and the archive wiping seems not just vindictive but weird from a profit standpoint. But if you think this is some sort of hammer blow to democracy or a Big Evil Conspiracy…
NOW YOU KNOW HOW THE RUST BELT FEELS
“Gosh they didn’t even keep on a housekeeping staff in case they want to reopen the plant down the road.”
“Man, so vindictive. We were fired without warning when we tried to unionize a company that was losing money for years.”
“We didn’t get any warning, we couldn’t prepare for the next step in our career, they cut more than was ‘strictly necessary.'”
All fair complaints. All quite possible true. But let’s all measure our reactions here. How would you respond to a 300 person factory [being closed]? “It’s just technological competition; this kind of smokestack industry isn’t sustainable anymore.” Hello, local journalism, my old friend.
…
NYT ran a piece on a small business closing within *minutes* of the announcement. I am urging twitter to perhaps take a step back and use this as a moment to do some introspection about how they treat other industries.
Stone is exactly right. The thing that struck me about Carrier was not just that there was so little concern about people losing their jobs, but that commentators gave an impression they didn’t want them to be saved, lest it generate any positive press for Trump.
Given that the media industry has been subjected to many of the same forces ripping apart so many others, one would think its practitioners would be looking to make common cause across-industries, but that’s not the case.
The other irony is that most cities never had a DNAinfo or an “-ist” site to begin with. They had their local paper, now owned by some national chain and largely gutted. And their local TV and radio stations, which the FCC is now promoting the gutting of, with no pushback from many of the people crying about DNA. The bigger cities are now getting brought down closer to the same level everyone else is already at, and they don’t like much at all. All of a sudden, the loss of local news is a crisis.
I think the loss of sites like DNA is a problem. I hope somebody is able to fill the void and that the archives are reinstated, as reports suggest they will be. But the gap in local coverage is far greater than just New York, Chicago, and a handful of other major markets where DNA operated.
There are some bright spots. Vox Media runs some verticals, Curbed and Eater, that seem to be doing well in major local markets. Or at least the company itself seems viable. This isn’t full spectrum local coverage, but it is covering some niches. Maybe this sort of thing could be expanded to other verticals. In the meantime, disruption of the media space continues.
Just wait ’til professions whose numbers are still largely unaffected by technological advances start feeling the heat…
“the heat” of what?
I think you’re missing or glossing over some context here. The outrage isn’t just that some journalists lost their jobs, it’s that the entire family of sites, including ones which were just purchased, were closed and immediately and entirely removed from the web.
Imagine if Carrier, upon hearing that one plant unionized, summarily closed the plant. And instead of moving production to Mexico completely left that entire marketplace, and for good measure bulldozed 1000 remaining heating or cooling units so no one could buy, or even look at them.
I was a daily DNAInfo reader in Chicago, it had real value to me, though I always assumed it likely wasn’t making money. It’s not a surprise that the economics didn’t work … but that’s not the whole story here either. Either this is completely personal for Ricketts, or he wasn’t so savvy of a business person after all.
There’s also the issue that, technically, it’s a violation of law to shut down a business because it unionized — and Ricketts’ spokesperson was pretty open about that. Of course, Ricketts figured with a Trump NLRB (the Ricketts family has been Trump supporters), he has absolutely zero chance of ever being investigated, much less cited.
Also, I would argue your point about Carrier and job losses elsewhere, and how they’re treated. No doubt, media job losses do get magnified more than others, but there’s been a lot of coverage since, forever, in job losses, and the impact they have on communities. Of course, with less local media available to cover them, anyone can be excused for thinking they didn’t see anything.
I also think it’s worth pointing out that if Carrier ceases production, consumers have a large number of other choices to meet their heating and cooling needs. But after the demise of DNAinfo, Gothamist, and Chicagoist, there are few to no hyperlocal news outlets remaining in those cities. Readers can’t just replace them by switching to a competitor. I think this, not an insensitivity to blue collar job losses. is what’s responsible for the disproportionate number of tears shed for this closure versus that of the Carrier plant you mention.
Keep in mind that the DNA employees did not have to go through what many offshoring victims did. No one forced them to train foreign replacement workers on pain of losing their severance, for example.
Jeez, Aaron, that’s like saying the guy was only punched not beaten with a club. Ricketts could have continued–he apparently is well heeled–this was an ideological maneuver. While I rarely visited Gothamist, I did check both SFist, and DNA in Chicago with some regularity. We need a list of his other enterprises so we know whom not to patronize.
As to Carrier , who skillfully used Trump as cover while still shuttering plants, perhaps we should consider limiting patents to products manufactured domestically as in move the work to … anyone else within the US becomes able to produce copies.
Aaron, the reason no one cared about Carrier in Indiana, and some people may actually have been rooting against it, has less to do with Donald Trump than Mike Pence.
Have you read Edward McClelland’s excellent Nothing But Blue Skies? There’s an entire chapter in there about the hole Carrier left in Syracuse when it closed its local plants and moved them to right-to-work states like Indiana, which is particularly notorious for poaching jobs from other states. Scab state got scabbed, boo boo, shoulda hustled harder. WELCOME TO THE RUST BELT, INDIANA.
Indiana became a right to work state in 2012. Syracuse lost its last Carrier plant in 2003. You have a small time issue in your analysis.
Oops! Thank you for the correction. I hope my larger point about another community losing out on those jobs so they could be in Indiana in the first place still stands.
Your larger point is questionable.
Carrier acquired Bryant, which was in Indianapolis for most of the 20th century. It’s certainly possible that when UTC consolidated the two, duplicated facilities were closed…but those jobs weren’t moved from Syracuse to a new facility in Indiana.
I think media people, in general, actually are pretty sympathetic to job losses in the Rust Belt (there are some exceptions). I have read countless stories about shuttered factories in the Midwest in outlets like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and others. Even liberal-elite mouthpiece Vox runs them from time to time. Arguments that the media doesn’t have empathy for the Rust Belt’s economically disenfranchised workers tend to hinge on cultural factors, which I honestly find strange and slightly disingenuous. It is entirely possible to empathize with people who don’t vote the same way as you, or listen to different music, or whatever.
Using Carrier as a counterpoint to this is very cherry-picked, and strange. The Carrier story was covered large from the POV of Trump’s “deal” on the jobs, which was portrayed as meaningless grandstanding that will make real difference overall. If you want to argue that this is an example of the media’s anti-Trump bias, fine. But it also happens to be, at least mostly, true .
This is honestly the sort of thing that conservative intellectuals like Aaron and Lyman Stone like to do to signal that they’re different from the liberal intellectuals that they often interact with. I like Aaron, I like what I’ve read of Lyman Stone (even if I don’t always agree with them), but this sort of writing is really cringe-worthy and it’s really obvious that there’s a certain sort of “I’m not like THOSE people” involved in it.
I agree on Carrier. Trump swooped in to try to grab early headlines there, and most of the subsequent stories I’ve read are on how they are moving anyway, a kind of “rest of the story” story to get beyond his Twitter-like actions.
Will make NO real difference overall…heh…typo.
I’m starting to wonder about the future of actual journalism. Hard/straight news is declining rapidly. Journalism is starting to resemble more feature and opinion pieces.
The future appears to be ownership of small to large media publications and papers by rich plutocrat types, billionaires, corporations etc. For example – Jeff Bezos of Amazon owning the WAPO, Carlos Slim having a big stake in NYT, Murdoch in FOX, GE owning NBC, ect.
We know most of the time they will be operating at a steep loss, so why invest and buy these publications? The obvious answer is to influence what is news. In Bezos case the best kind of “advertising” might be the Wapo itself and the stories it publishes – or the ones it doesn’t.
With lesser journalistic requirements from alternative and smaller outlets, the standards will lower from hard news that involves local coverage – as well as national – and focus more on stories that generate buzz. Even at the big dogs like NYT, Rolling Stone, ect standards have slipped quite a bit.
This is a new era and a return to a kind of digital yellow journalism seems inevitable.
I don’t agree on people like Bezos buying media simply for self interest. Carnegie funded libraries. Maybe Bezos thinks there’s an equivalent benefit to good reporting.
These closures are the logical end of the dot com era, when startups raised money with the promise of “monetization” but no clear plans for doing so. There must be some kind of Gresham Law for information, with the “fake news” of social media driving out real reporting. Even the free weeklies, which existed on personals, are largely irrelevant. The pay walls are going up everywhere, and the result will be coastal elites paying for fact and insight, and Trump Country living on shouting and show. So far, the lesson of Trump is that the mass market for information does not respond quickly, that there is no guaranty that truth will out over hype and exploitation. Taking a long view, it may be that this is one way that the U.S. begins to go down.
There was a time when there was another country inside the country, Rod. We’ve been here before. This isn’t the end of history.
I do take the long view, and was a history major in college. That includes a term at Oxford studying the urban history of the English Industrial Revolution, for which the lessons are all too clear that countries can very quicly lose their edge.
..and they can find a new “edge’ just as quickly. The U.S. has done so several times.