In a nice “screw you” to the corporate masters of the world, public radio stations WNYC, KPCC, and WAMU have acquired the archives of local news brand Gothamist as well as some of its sister publications like LAist, DCist, and DNAInfo. This deal will allow the archives of the sites to remain online following their sudden shutdown last year, when billionaire Joe Ricketts shuttered the sites and pulled all of their old stories from the internet just a week after they voted to unionize. Gothamist will also be fully resurrected this year and will continue publishing new stories, though they won’t be rehiring the fired Gothamist staffers just yet.
This all comes from Wired, which says WNYC will begin reviving the brand with stories written by its own existing staff, and “eventually” a new batch of hires—including “former Gothamist writers interested in getting the band back together”—will be brought on board. The group of radio stations is also working to set up similar programs to resurrect the other local Gothamist sites across cities like Chicago and San Francisco, but DNAInfo will “live on in its archives only.”