Participants in the DYCD-funded “Young Journalist in Training” Program, led by BK Reader. These budding correspondents interviewed the grandmother-granddaughter owners of the historic Emeline’s Restaurant in Bed-Stuy
By the Editor of the Brooklyn Reader
As some of you may have heard, hyperlocal news just took a major hit last week with the sudden closing of DNAinfo, Gothamist and its sister sites in California, Chicago and Washington, DC. The sites’ owner Joe Ricketts, a Trump-supporting billionaire and also owner of the Chicago Cubs, shut down all of the sites after the company’s NYC-based writers voted to unionize.
It seems the desire of DNAinfo’s writers to attain something basic like, umm, I don’t know– a living wage– was the straw that broke the camel’s back. For Ricketts, profits in hyperlocal already were thin and getting thinner… And so Ricketts did what most billionaire business owners do when their money trees start bearing less fruit– he cut it down.
“DNAinfo is, at the end of the day, a business, and businesses need to be economically successful if they are to endure…” said Ricketts. “I’m hopeful that in time, someone will crack the code on a business that can support exceptional neighborhood storytelling, for I believe telling those stories remains essential.”
So, for the past few days, between the writers losing all of their clips (Ricketts initially erased the last two years of stories, but reportedly, they have since been recovered) and the nation losing a respected local news outlet, the news community has been quaking around what it assumes is the possible end of widespread hyperlocal news reporting. And everyone is #smh and #omg and oh-so-sad.
Me? Well… not so much.
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