Chicago City Wire

News outlets Gothamist and DNAinfo, which focused on neighborhood news in cities such as Chicago, have closed citing business difficulties and a vote to unionize in the publications’ New York offices, according to a report from CBS News.

"I've made the difficult decision to discontinue publishing DNAinfo and Gothamist,” DNAinfo and Gothamist CEO Joe Ricketts wrote in his announcement of the closure. “Reaching this decision wasn't easy, and it wasn't one that I made lightly … But DNAinfo is, at the end of the day, a business, and businesses need to be economically successful if they are to endure.”

Ricketts announced his decision Nov. 2, one week after New York editorial staff voted to unionize under the Writers Guild of America East, a move that Ricketts had openly pushed back against, according to CBS News. Ricketts argued in his announcement that the business, while successfully growing to reach more than 9 million site visitors each month, was not sustainable.

DNAinfo and Gothamist CEO Joe Ricketts | www.dnainfo.com

"[W]hile 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,” Rickett wrote in his announcement.