Last Thursday, Emma Whitford, a reporter for the New York City news Web site Gothamist, was writing up a story about the placement of protective concrete barriers along the West Side Highway in the wake of the terrorist attack that killed eight people and injured eleven more on Halloween. Around 5 P.M., an editor told her that the content-management system was down. They thought nothing of it at first—it happened from time to time. Then Whitford looked at the site’s home page, or what used to be the home page. It was gone, along with all of the site’s current and past stories. Internal communication networks, such as the company’s Slack channel, were also closed.

Gwynne Hogan, a reporter who covered the Williamsburg, Bushwick, and Greenpoint neighborhoods of Brooklyn for Gothamist’s sister site, DNAinfo, was in the field that afternoon, sitting on the stoop of the home of an eighteen-year-old girl whose body had recently been found. Hogan had noticed that the girl, before her death, in July, had posted a picture of herself on social media taken in the place where her body was eventually recovered—yet, for four months, as police searched, apparently, no one had thought to look there. “I called my editor and I was explaining what I’d found, and during the phone conversation he started saying, ‘Oh, my God, oh, my God.’ I thought he was reacting to what I was saying, but he was looking at the site. He’d seen the letter.”

The letter was from Joe Ricketts, the billionaire owner of Gothamist and DNAinfo. At the URLs of both sites was a statement in which Ricketts explained that he was closing them because they weren’t profitable. “I’m hopeful that in time, someone will crack the code on a business that can support exceptional neighborhood storytelling,” he wrote. Reading the letter, Whitford told me, “I burst into tears. It could not have been more abrupt or brutal.” The sites’ archives were reinstated the following day, after an angry backlash—not just for the vanished journalism but also for the hundred and fifteen laid-off reporters, editors, and other staff. How were they supposed to find new jobs without their writing clips to show?

Ricketts, the founder of the online stock brokerage TD Ameritrade, launched DNAinfo, in 2009, as an ambitious investment in the diminishing field of local-news reporting. Operating in New York and Chicago, the site’s journalists covered topics such as real estate, zoning, roads, schools, and parks, in neighborhood beats. They’d publish stories on subjects ranging from a cat trapped inside a shuttered building to minor road repairs in Brooklyn to outbreaks of Legionnaires’ disease in the Bronx—the kinds of granular street-level accounts that have been increasingly overlooked as digital media focusses on more ad-friendly national and international markets. In March of 2017, Ricketts acquired Gothamist, a franchise of eight city-centric Web sites that did local reporting as well as blog-style editorials, opinions, cultural coverage, and snark. After the purchase, which was for an undisclosed sum, Ricketts said in a statement that Gothamist “fits right in with our vision for future expansion,” adding, “We think the result will be the most potent online source of neighborhood news and information available anywhere.” Ultimately, the newsrooms operated jointly for only eight months.

A week before the sites were shuttered, the staffs of DNAinfo and Gothamist had unionized with the Writers Guild of America, East. At many other media outlets that have successfully unionized in recent years—among them Vice and Gizmodo, which is owned by Univision—“the guy in charge has a liberal-media-owner reputation to maintain,” as Whitford put it. Ricketts, by contrast, is a major right-wing donor who—as Jacobin recently reported—has given millions of dollars to anti-labor politicians at the state and federal level. It is not illegal for a C.E.O. to shut down a business because his company has formed a union, but threatening employees with closure is against the law. In recent days, multiple former staffers told me that, in both coded and explicit ways, management had warned them repeatedly in the months before they unionized that doing so would mean that the sites would cease to exist. Some asked to speak to me off the record, for fear of angering their former bosses. Ricketts did not respond to my request for comment. His representative, who asked to be cited as “a spokesperson for DNAinfo,” said, in an e-mailed statement, that “While DNAinfo had made progress toward profitability, that progress wasn’t sufficient to continue the business.”

When Ricketts merged DNAinfo and Gothamist, last March, Hogan and Whitford told me, there was little sense of management’s plan for how the sites would fit together. The two newsrooms had previously competed for stories in New York and Chicago; now, Hogan told me, of Gothamist, “It felt like they were still my competitor.” There were other points of confusion: Jezebel reported, in March, that Gothamist had deleted at least five stories from its archive that were critical of the Ricketts family’s politics. One DNAinfo reporter told Jezebel at the time, “Nobody seems to know what’s going on. Our editors want to give us information, but I don’t think they even know.” Jen Chung and Jake Dobkin, who co-founded Gothamist, in 2003, and, after selling it to Ricketts, remained at the site as executive editor and publisher, respectively, told Jezebel that “no one asked us” to delete the Ricketts stories; they did it because “we don’t cover Mr. Ricketts.” Whitford told me that the deletion of pieces raised “questions about censorship: did we have new restraints all of a sudden that we didn’t know about?”

Gothamist staff members had already begun discussions of unionizing before the merger. Afterward, they started to bring their new DNAinfo colleagues into the conversations. None of the employees I spoke to had complaints with their working conditions under Ricketts. Many told me that they were treated fairly and compensated well. The mission in unionizing, Whitford said, was, “We want this to be a place that’s good to work at and stay. To keep the newsroom strong and vital, and to clarify communication.” The effort, multiple staff members told me, also became a way for the newly consolidated teams to have productive discussions about how their jobs had changed. “That was more effective than top-down management at getting us together,” Whitford said.

Within a few weeks, though, management got wind of the staff’s unionizing discussions. On April 7th, just before the two sites were to be integrated officially, with Gothamist staff moving from Dumbo to midtown Manhattan, Jen Chung called a meeting to speak with the DNAinfo staff in the presence of Dan Swartz, whom Ricketts had appointed as chief operating officer the month before. At their office in midtown, Swartz and Chung stood in front of the newsroom and delivered a set of prepared remarks. In an audio recording of the meeting that a DNAinfo reporter shared with me, Chung says that she’s heard there’s been talk of unionizing, and that staff members should “just know what you’re getting yourself into.”

“When you sign the union card, you give up the right to speak for yourself, because the union is going to be speaking for you,” she added, and continued, “You may have heard that joining a union automatically gets you higher wages, better benefits, if you sign the card. That’s not how it works.” The staff had known this speech was coming; the same meeting had been held in the Chicago office the day before. In New York, Noah Hurowitz, a reporter for the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, told me, the staff wore all black in protest, and said nothing from the time Swartz and Chung began to when they left the room. Toward the end of the meeting—before she and Swartz headed to Brooklyn, to deliver the same remarks to the Gothamist newsroom—Chung tried to engage the assembled DNAinfo staff, saying, “So, I’m sure some of you have questions . . . ” In the recording, this remark is followed by several seconds of ambient static as the room remained silent. A few days later, the New York Daily News was leaked a letter Swartz had written to the DNAinfo staff. Ricketts had invested “literally tens of millions of dollars of his own money” in the site, Swartz said in the note, adding, “Would a union be the final straw that caused the business to be closed?”