Pretty shocking news reverberating off the blog echo chamber this morning. One of Shanghai's best, most widely read, and longest running platforms for China news aggregation and Shanghai cultural reporting is no more. Shanghaiist, our city's offshoot of the Gothamist "neighborhood news" network, has been closed down by its American owner, billionaire Joe Ricketts. His closing statement can be read on the Shanghaiist.com right now.

*** The key bit:

Purchasing the company in 2009, Ricketts cites insufficient progress towards economic goals as his reasoning to discontinue the network, which includes sites in New York, LA, Washington DC, and more. Already in American media, however, commentators are speculating that the decision has much more to do with the fact that the New York branch of the company successfully voted to join the Writers Guild just a week ago. Ricketts, a corpulent Trump donator, is an ardent opponent to unions, commenting, "I believe unions promote a corrosive us-against-them dynamic that destroys the esprit de corps businesses need to succeed.”

Ricketts furthermore incidentally made threats to shut the company down if they unionized. It appears, not only did Ricketts make good on his threat, he's also rendered archived content inaccessible -- pretty much a huge middle finger to the 150 or so writers who currently work there and the many, many more who used to.

Speaking directly to Shanghaiist articles, they pop up in Google search, but when you open them up, it redirects to the closure notice. Shitty day for people who aren't billionaires. And a huge loss for Shanghai. Over the years since its founding by Dan Washburn in 2005, and through Elaine Chow's and Kenneth Tan's tenures as Managing Editor (among others), it served as a valuable resource championing Shanghai local culture and also a platform that didn't shrink away from hosting difficult and challenging REAL NEWS stories.

This announcement is maybe too fresh to properly eulogize them, suffice it to say a huge amount of writers (fine, "bloggers") got their start there, myself included. From across the digital neighborhood, SmartShanghai offers our condolences: That's some bullshit. Some total bullshit. We've reached out to Kenneth for a comment and are waiting to hear back.

Hopefully, he's logged off, unplugged, and is having a drink somewhere.