NEW YORK _ The billionaire owner of hyperlocal news sites DNAinfo and Gothamist shut them down Thursday _ just a week after staffers voted to join a union.
Joe Ricketts, a supporter of President Donald Trump who made billions as the founder of TD Ameritrade, yanked the sites at 5 p.m. EDT and sent an email to employees to let them know they lost their jobs.
"I've made the difficult decision to begin the orderly wind down of the DNAinfo/Gothamist business," Ricketts wrote.
"Reaching this decision wasn't easy, and it wasn't one I made lightly," he said in the email, most of which was also posted online to replace the now-defunct sites.
Ricketts said he pulled the plug because the DNA brand _ which was melded with Gothamist sites earlier this year _ failed to turn a profit.
"Businesses need to be economically successful if they are to endure. 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," Ricketts wrote.
He closed down the entire company, although only 27 employees in New York voted on Oct. 27 to join the Writers Guild of America East.
The decision left 115 people without jobs in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, D.C. and New York.
WGAE was alerted to the shutdown at the same time as employees, the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson stressed that it was a financially motivated decision, noting that DNA lost money every year since its 2009 launch.
But Ricketts, an outspoken opponent of unions, had signaled he might bail on the business if WGAE's vote was successful.
"(We) will be looking at all of our potential areas of recourse and we will aggressively pursue our new members' rights," WGAE said in a statement.
Staffers will get full pay and benefits until Feb. 2, the company said in its email.
Noah Hurowitz, a DNAinfo reporter who openly pushed to join WGAE, said he was "devastated" by the email _ yet still defiant.
"I don't regret a thing," he said, of the union vote.
But, he added, "There are a lot of neighborhood stories that aren't going to get covered anymore."
