Joe Ricketts (of the Chicago Cubs’ owning Ricketts family fame) caused a bit of controversy in the media world this past week when he abruptly shut the doors of DNAinfo/The Gothamist, a hyper-local online publication that had offices in major U.S. cities and its largest offices in New York and Chicago.
“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 said in a letter announcing his decision.
The straw that broke the camel’s back though was when a group of writers in the largest bureau, New York, made the decision to unionize, against the wishes of Ricketts. That one decision led to 116 people losing their jobs, immediately. They were all warned not to unionize, but they ignored the warning and now everything is over.
DNAinfo’s audience was nothing to sneeze at. According to a story in the Chicago Tribune, “the neighborhood news coverage in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and other markets drew more than 15 million visits per month...” Like all successful business ventures, “where the revenue/money comes from” is sort of an important concern. An existential one, even. Who pays for the entity to continue to operate? Customers? Investors? Sponsors?
In DNAinfo’s case the money came directly from John Ricketts. All of it in the beginning, as a matter of fact. If not for him, and him alone, the entity would have never existed in the first place. He went out and created over 100 jobs – that didn’t exist previously, mind you – in the media field. I’ll tell you as someone in the media field (radio broadcasting) any sort of “new” jobs are welcome, because the total number of jobs in the journalism field has been slowly but surely dwindling for decades.

As someone who also founded a business entity from scratch (my syndicated radio show, which compared to the Ricketts family’s venture is, teeny tiny... but hey, I’m profitable), I know the struggles of running a business. I know that sometimes you have great years, sometimes you don’t. Some things are in your control and some things are not, but you can never lose sight of where the money comes from and how much is going out. That’s business.
When profits are down, if you’ve got a giant safety net like a billionaire, everyone working there still gets paid. When you don’t have a billionaire backing you, you must make significant cuts to keep the business afloat, and the those cuts most frequently come in the form of jobs, unfortunately. Again, that’s business.
So what happened at DNAinfo/theGothamist? Apparently a group of writers in the New York bureau got the bright idea rather than attempt to perhaps find a way to create more revenue for their company (helping with advertising sales maybe?) to demand higher wages from their boss, in the form of unionizing. Depending on the situation, forming a union in and of itself is not always bad, but in this case Ricketts’ position was crystal clear: As he posted in a blog in September titled “Why I’m Against Unions At Businesses I Create.” He wrote, “Unions promote a corrosive us-against-them dynamic that destroys the esprit de corps businesses need to succeed.”
When your money source – the literal hand that feeds you – tells you this isn’t something you should do if you want to remain employed, it’s probably smart to listen.
It turns out most DNA employees didn’t even want to unionize in the first place. The Chicago and Los Angeles bureaus weren’t interested in upsetting the apple cart, let alone threatening to bite the hand that fed them. It was just one bureau, the New York one, that decided they wanted to unionize, and that was enough of a signal to Ricketts that his business had reached the point of no return.
I doubt the pro-union crew in New York spent a whole lot of time trying to figure out how to make their company more money. Instead, they “demanded” more money for themselves (in the form of unionizing) and their salaries went from whatever they were (and what they apparently weren’t satisfied with) all the way down to zero. They jumped off the cliff and took all of their co-workers with them.
I suppose that’s always the risk you take when you threaten to bite the hand that feeds you.

Mike Koolidge lives in Rochelle and hosts the regionally syndicated radio program The Michael Koolidge Show (www.koolidge.com) heard daily on 10 radio stations statewide, including Rockford’s 1440 WROK from 9 to 11 a.m. live every weekday morning. Mike will be broadcasting live at Salt 251 in Rochelle on Wednesday, Nov. 22nd (Thanksgiving Eve). Public officials and citizens can reach the show anytime at radio@koolidge.com or 815-561-7130.