Union-foe mogul kills news sites

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 Trump who made billions as the founder of TD Ameritrade, yanked the sites at 5 p.m., 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 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 (WGAE).

The decision left 115 people without jobs in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington and New York.

The shuttering of the sites appeared to have also wiped out all of their archived stories. But a DNAinfo spokesperson said they would be preserved.

WGAE was alerted to the shutdown at the same time as employees, a spokeswoman said.

She said 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.

Reporters and editors at the New York sites gathered at a Lower East Side bar Thursday night to toast their coverage of the city.

“I’m very appreciative of the readers that read us because that’s what it was about,” said DNAinfo reporter Katie Honan.

Reporter Ben Fractenberg said the closure of the sites dealt a major blow to local journalism.

“There’s a gap in local news and people want to know what’s going on in their neighborhood and we were helping to do that,” he said.