 Regarding the removal of Ricketts related content from the site, Dobkin told Jezebel, “Just as Bloomberg doesn’t cover Bloomberg, we don’t plan to cover Joe Ricketts and so we decided to take down our coverage of him.No one asked us to do it.It was a decision made solely by Jen [Chung] and me.”

On November 2, 2017, Ricketts posted to both DNAinfo and the "-ist" network sites that both websites would immediately cease operations, a week after Gothamist writers voted to unionize with the Writers Guild of America, East.