I read DNAinfoChicago from the get-go. It was, at first. a great news aggregate that offered local coverage.
I gotta go with Joe about its demise, Joe Ricketts, that is, the Cubs' Grandpa, “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.”
News coverage of local events became less devout and political hack-work seemed to ooze from every column.
DNAinfoChicago somehow morphed into the detested MEDIA. Same old, same old.
Solid writers like Mark Schipper and Ed Komenda disappeared and activist group-think writers dominated the coverage.
Most telling for me was the awful coverage of the idiot who pulled a gun on people after he was asked to not block the entrance of the firehouse on 111th Street.
The idiot was shot and killed, when he aimed his weapon at people.
The idiot had been celebrating a relative's funeral by weaving in and out of the heavily trafficked lanes of 111th Street, the commercial district for the Mount Greenwood neighborhood. Traffic stalled and the Hossier Hothead acted out with his weapon and his mouth.
I had had my haircut on the site of the violence and where the dope met his demise, only an hour before the folly.
However, DNAinfoChicago reporters, Joe Ward especially. conflated identity politics, race-baiting and social justice warfare with what had taken place - Marist high school was placed in the cross-hairs and community scab-yanking over imagined and occasionally accurate racism became the menu all of the month of November 2016, until the facts un-Pflegered the story. Joe Ward never once considered covering the Revolutionary Communist Party's orchestration of the post shooting protests. That would have chopped his narrative.
The DNAinfo Joshua Beal mythology can be found here, because the archived yarns are shut down.
Joe Ricketts owned the site and Gothamist and decided to close shop.
Conflated coverage of the news is what the detested American media is all about. People want to know what is happening in their neighborhoods. DNAinfoChicago tried to do that and ended up being another detested outlet for prefabricated opinions.
The Sun Times, owned by the public service unions, did a hit piece on the news of DNAinfoChicago's demise, not unlike the covergae of the late Mr. Beal:
A week before the shutdown, the Gothamist and DNAinfo newsrooms in New York voted to join the Writers Guild of America East, which released a statement Thursday saying “it is no secret that threats were made to these workers during the organizing drive.”Joe Ricketts was right. Joe Ricketts gave his employees a pretty decent severance package. More than an SEIU janitor can expect when all of the public funding has dried up.
In a September post entitled “Why I’m Against Unions At Businesses I Create,” Ricketts wrote on his personal blog of his belief “that unions exert efforts that tend to destroy the Free Enterprise system.”
“I believe unions promote a corrosive us-against-them dynamic that destroys the esprit de corps businesses need to succeed,” Ricketts wrote. “And that corrosive dynamic makes no sense in my mind where an entrepreneur is staking his capital on a business that is providing jobs and promoting innovation.”
According to a New York Times report, 115 reporters from the websites who are now out of a job will receive three months of paid “administrative leave” at their full salaries, along with four weeks of severance pay.
So, we say goodbye to DNAinfoChicago. Goodbye.
Thanks for the shot at news coverage Joe Ricketts. It was appreciated by people like me, until the good writers disappeared.
Next time you set up shop, hire writers and tell the 'journalists' to get a union card and get fitted for a purple T-shirt.
