Image by Jim Havard used with permission.

We're devastated by the news that DCist and its sibling news sites have been abruptly closed by their owner, billionaire Joe Ricketts, who didn't even give his employees the dignity of a warning before abruptly cutting off all access to the site. Ricketts, who owns DNAinfo, bought DCist’s New York-based parent company Gothamist earlier this year. He shut down the websites just days after employees voted to unionize.

DCist filled a vital niche for local journalism. Its current staff–Rachel Sadon, Rachel Kurzius, and Christina Sturdivant–covered stories that couldn't be found elsewhere, boosted marginalized voices, and kept powerful people accountable. In many ways it's been the millennials' local paper of record, and other local media relied on their insights and reporting. We at GGWash frequently posted their pieces in Breakfast Links or cited them in our stories, and otherwise relied on them to be better informed about DC.

DCist was also a training ground for many local journalists, including our current lead editor. They boast an impressive pedigree of former writers and editors who have gone on to do incredible reporting elsewhere, and we wish the same favorable fate for its current talented journalists.

With DCist shutting its doors and Washington City Paper's uncertain future, local DC news is facing huge gaps. An anemic press not only makes for weaker communities, but a weaker democracy. We at GGWash don't know how we'll respond or evolve yet to this incident, but we wanted to share some of our thoughts on its closing.

Dan Reed says,

When I started a neighborhood blog in 2006, DCist felt both like a knowledgeable friend and a snarky foil. I am totally heartbroken. Part of our local media landscape has died. I can only wonder what monkeyrotica, the heart and soul of the DCist commenter section, would have to say about this.

Joanne Tang says,

I want to give a shoutout to Pablo Maurer’s amazing photography and sense of history with his Abandoned States posts, which showed not just the decline of abandoned buildings in our region (and beyond it), but captured how nature reclaimed them and what life was like for the people who lived, worked, and visited them.

As someone who is curious about abandoned buildings and the history of regular, every day people this is what hurts me the most. We can get coverage of special sandwiches and happy hours from a lot of other sites but Pablo’s photography of these old, forgotten places and their history is a huge loss.

Stephen Repetski says,

This is terrible news. Local journalism is a critical source of information that the big papers like the Post and Times just can't fill. Local papers report on school board elections; local papers follow up on police incidents and are able to investigate on smaller things a national paper might gloss over; local papers can take what's happening over at the Capitol and bring home how those actions impact their local communities. It's a damn shame for these outlets to have closed with few viable replacements to fill their shoes.

On the media angle, the newsrooms of DNAinfo and Gothamist voted to unionize just last week; Ricketts wrote a blog post in September titled “Why I'm Against Unions At Businesses I Create,” which may be related to the closure. The financial crisis that local journalism is going through hurts our communities and (dare I say) our democracy. Today is a sad day.

Geoffrey Hatchard says,

A decade of living in DC made me accustomed to having a vibrant local media covering everything from local politics to music, neighborhoods to theater. I've missed it greatly since coming to San José, which lacks that media environment and infrastructure. If you lose that ability to be informed, your city becomes a much poorer place.

David Meni says,

Writing and editing for 730DC means I've really come to rely on DCist. Losing them and their sister publications is unfathomably heartbreaking, and an astounding act of unnecessary cruelty on the part of Joe Ricketts. Deleting the archives and unceremoniously firing over a hundred employees without notice makes it quite clear that he simply got fed up with journalists that wanted to write about things like DC DSA's increase in membership, and Gothamist employees vote to unionize.

I'm sympathetic to the fact that it's hard to make a profit off of local journalism nowadays (I get paid $0 to do it), but this kind of vindictiveness is not the behavior of someone who simply couldn't turn a profit. As someone who reads almost every single local news site every day, DCist was one of my favorites–GGWash excepted, of course! They frequently broke important stories, had lively and fun comments sections, and wrote about many things nobody else was talking about.

Now more than ever, it's important to support our local media. Let’s work together to preserve the local reporting that still exists, by reading, engaging with, and supporting local journalism.

Greater Greater Washington's editorial board is a group of volunteers responsible for our editorial direction and policies as well as any official editorials.