Everyone Should Fear What Happened to the Gothamist Sites

Four days ago, while on my lunch break, I lost my job as editor-in-chief at LAist. I’d just finished a bowl of unmemorable office cafeteria chili and was sitting in the lobby of our WeWork when a coworker in New York sent me a three-word text: “Check your inbox.”

At the same time, a writer who’d started with us a few weeks earlier was trying to preview a post but couldn’t get the site to load. Another writer walked over to help her, but when he finally managed to refresh the page, her work was nowhere to be found. Instead, the entire site—which had been in operation for more than a decade—had disappeared. In place of 13 years of work, there was just a letter from our billionaire owner Joe Ricketts, informing readers that he had made “the difficult decision” to discontinue publishing DNAinfo and Gothamist, our parent site.