Local news site SFist abruptly shuts down

SFist owner Joe Ricketts announced the closure of the site, and associated digital media sites in its network, in a letter posted to the SFist domain on Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2017. SFist owner Joe Ricketts announced the closure of the site, and associated digital media sites in its network, in a letter posted to the SFist domain on Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2017. Photo: Screen Grab Photo: Screen Grab Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close Local news site SFist abruptly shuts down 1 / 4 Back to Gallery

Update: The SFist homepage was live as of Friday afternoon. New content does not appear to be posted, with the most recent story having a timestamp of 1:45 p.m. Thursday.

Local news site SFist is shutting down, according to a redirect message that appeared on the site's domain Thursday afternoon.

Joe Ricketts, who bought SFist earlier this year, will also shutter associated sites under the DNAinfo and Gothamist umbrella in Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, Shanghai and New York.

About 2 p.m., a letter from Ricketts, the billionaire founder of TD Ameritrade, appeared on the SFist page, which had been posting new content earlier that day.

"DNAinfo is, at the end of the day, a business, and businesses need to be economically successful if they are to endure," Ricketts wrote. "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."

SFist contributors had received assignments just over an hour before the shutdown message appeared, said Joe Kukura, a freelance writer for the site.

Rain Jokinen, who contributed to SFist for more than a decade, said she heard about the shut down through social media before confirming with her editor that, "I wouldn't be needing to submit a movie review tomorrow, as scheduled."

Email text, obtained by SFGATE, sent from an editor to freelance writers seems to suggest that the editor was not expecting the shutdown.

"So you may have heard the news that Gothamist and DNA Info are effectively winding down starting today," the email read. "We have to assume this is true though I'm waiting to hear possibly more tomorrow."

Barmann could not be immediately reached to comment.

The SFist site was founded by Eve Batey, Rita Hao and Jackson West in 2004.

Batey, now a senior editor, learned of the closure Thursday. She told SFGATE, "It's been a wild, wonderful ride, and while I'm sad today at how things appear to have ended, I'm still happy that for so long it was such a big part of, I hope, so many of our lives."

Former SFist editor Brock Keeling said he was "stunned" by the news of the 13-year-old site's closure.

"It was amazing. It was a community," Keeling said. "It produced some strong, sharp voices that will be missed."

The official SFist Twitter account was still active about 20 minutes before the announcement. Though all the articles appeared to disappear from SFist and associated sites, an official at DNAinfo told the New York Times that the stories would be archived online.

Journalists at the New York-based Gothamist and DNAinfo sites voted to join the Writers Guild of America East last week. An official from DNAinfo told the Times, "The decision by the editorial team to unionize is simply another competitive obstacle making it harder for business to be financially successful."

In a Wednesday statement, the Guild said it was "deeply concerned by Joe Ricketts' decision to shut down" the sites.

"It is no secret that threats were made to these workers during the organizing drive," the statement said. "The Guild will be looking at all of our potential areas of recourse and we will aggressively pursue our new members [sic] rights."

Ricketts, whose family owns the Chicago Cubs, purchased SFist and the sites in its national network in March 2017. In his statement, Ricketts thanked the company's employees – 115 who will lose their jobs, according to the Times – and his site's many loyal readers.

"I'm hopeful that in time, someone will crack the code on a business that can support exceptional neighborhood storytelling for I believe telling those stories remains essential," he wrote.

Michelle Robertson is an SFGATE staff writer. Email her at mrobertson@sfchronicle.com or find her on Twitter at @mrobertsonsf.