The uneasy, six-year marriage between WAMU and DCist came to a violent end today, with the local NPR affiliate laying off 15 employees and unceremoniously mothballing its popular local news website.
The shutdown caps an experiment in partnering the heavily suburban and older audience of public radio with the hard-charging new and lifestyle-heavy DCist team—a pairing that seemed to offer benefits to both sides but deteriorated during the past year.
News of DCist’s demise began to leak out Thursday evening when Washington Post reporter Elahe Izadi posted a screenshot of a portentous all-staff email from WAMU’s general manager Erika Pulley–Hayes, announcing that publishing would cease that evening and the offices would be closed Friday. Staff were directed to attend a 9 a.m. Zoom meeting Friday morning.
WAMU also yanked all the local programming on Friday, including the popular Politics Hour with Kojo Nnamdi.
Just before that meeting kicked off, the axe officially fell when Axios reporter Sara Fischer published an exclusive story announcing that WAMU was killing the local news site and laying off 15 staffers. The Washington Post reports that four journalists will keep their jobs.
Fischer’s report, which spun the move “as part of a strategic shift focused on audio,” was the first that many DCist staff members learned about the layoffs and shutdown.
The Axios report included details on the layoffs and future media strategy for WAMU, with quotes from Pulley-Hayes and Peter Cherukuri, vice chair of WAMU’s board of advisors. Cherukuri told Axios that “Too many media companies fail by trying to be all things to all people, leaving their value proposition diluted and weakened” while Pulley-Hayes blamed the “ripple effect across media consumption habits.” Fischer did not respond to emails about the exclusive.
Throughout the day Friday, multiple former DCist journalists have pushed back against the initial narrative presented by WAMU.
“Every DCist/WAMU reporter, like the four laid off today (myself included), writes for web AND produces audio stories,” housing reporter Morgan Baskin wrote on X. “You can’t fill a newscast without reporters!”
Longtime former DCist/WAMU reporter and editor Martin Austermuhle posted: “And they can call this a pivot to audio, or some such thing. Fine. But even on audio you won’t be able to cover the D.C. region well if you’re dumping staff, or driving them to the exits. If no one is there to make audio, there’s nothing to tune into.”
“Everyone was blindsided,” one DCist reporter tells City Paper, as several others describe a carefully orchestrated execution that caught most by surprise. The station leadership disabled the WAMU Slack channel on Thursday night, all of the station’s social channels were locked up and the DCist website now automatically redirects to WAMU’s homepage.
(Director of the DC Public Library system, Richard Reyes-Gavilan, says that the District government would try to acquire the DCist archives for its impressive collection of local history in the recently renovated Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library.)
Pulley-Hayes delivered the news to the newsroom in a pro-forma, 6-minute, 52-second Zoom meeting Friday morning; she took no questions and provided no details about the future, according to staffers who attended the meeting, many of whom requested anonymity out of fear of jeopardizing their severance pay.
Washingtonian reports that laid-off employees were told they will receive two weeks’ severance. But WAMU’s union contract requires “four (4) weeks’ notice or pay in lieu thereof” if there are layoffs.
Pulley-Hayes did not return emails or calls seeking comment, but some former staffers say that she insisted that the layoffs were part of a larger plan to double down on radio and audio audiences rather than chase the kind of news and culture content that was DCist’s bread and butter.
In an interview with City Paper, Nnamdi says he is disappointed by the layoffs and the demise of DCist: “The fact is that people whose work I value very highly and who I have a great deal of affection for have lost their jobs,” he says, adding, “It may have been unavoidable. It is characteristic of what’s happening in journalism today.”
Nnamdi notes that his show is performing well for WAMU and will continue again starting next week. He and co-cost Tom Sherwood (who is also a WCP contributor) would often invite DCist reports onto the Politics Hour to discuss their work.
As the NPR affiliate for the nation’s capital, WAMU operates in the eighth largest market in the country and has always had a special status because its listeners include members of Congress and administration officials.
Yet the station had struggled with maintaining relevance in an era of streaming, with many radio stations increasingly attracting older, more sedentary listeners. By acquiring DCist in 2018, WAMU was getting a team of young, energetic reporters committed to news coverage, alongside a strong digital presence.
WAMU has 43,000 followers on Twitter, while DCist had 393,000, not to mention a strong website that several staff say routinely eclipsed WAMU’s website by tens of thousands of visits. “The only time anyone goes to WAMU’s website is to check what time a program is going to air or to click “listen live.’ But people click on DCist every day, all day,” another former DCist reporter says.
In addition to Baskin (a WCP alum), the well-known voices let go on Friday include: Jacob Fenston, who covered the environment; Jenny Gathright, who covered criminal justice issues; Héctor Alejandro Arzate, who covered immigrant communities; and Eric Falquero, the former partnerships editor who used to lead the Street Sense newspaper.
But DCist had been bleeding for at least the past year. Transportation reporter Jordan Pascale left the outlet last September, and Austermuhle departed last summer for a new job in Switzerland—both taking with them a deep well of institutional knowledge. Neither of them was replaced.
Austermuhle, who started at DCist in 2011, worked there for two years and then was pulled into WAMU, where he spent a decade as a reporter and editor.
“How the hell do you plan on covering the D.C. region in any capacity when you just laid off your criminal justice reporter, your immigrant communities reporter, and your environment reporter,” Austermuhle says, fuming. “And you don’t even have reporters to cover Maryland, schools, transportation, and housing? What exactly can you pivot to if you have no content?”
Austermuhle, who approached reporting on District issues with the curiosity of an outsider and became a reliable real-time chronicler of news events on Twitter, says he thinks the layoff process was downright “cruel.”
“This is a failure of leadership more than anything,” he says. “Erika didn’t engage with us, she wasn’t straight with us, she didn’t seem to know or care what her own newsroom was doing.”
DCist started in 2004 and was originally owned by the company Gothamist, part of a network of local online outlets around the country, from New York to Los Angeles. The sites were variously acquired by organizations in their local markets. WAMU purchased DCist in 2018 with the distinct plan in D.C. being for WAMU to leverage the combined power of two newsrooms.
That relationship lasted for many years, with DCist and WAMU fielding its own slate of news reporters and coexisting in the same space under American University ownership with little discernible wall between them. During the pandemic, the wall got thinner as more and more DCist reporters began filing stories that would appear on the airwaves of WAMU or on its website.
For DCist, the shutdown Friday comes during a stretch of time in which local news has been devastated in the D.C. marketplace. The Post nudged 240 reporters, editors, and other employees out the door at the end of December with too-good-to-pass-up buyouts, while WTOP radio last year offered longtime staffers buyouts to curb expenses.
Meanwhile, national outlets such as the Wall Street Journal cut more than 31 people from its bureau in D.C., and the Los Angeles Times lost its top editor and many reporters, too.
But the loss of DCist also marks the end of a long journey that began to unravel during the past year with the loss of several critical pieces who weren’t replaced.
By Friday afternoon, the region’s devastation overflowed from elected leaders, loyal readers (and listeners), and other journalists.
The whole region was shocked and saddened by the news on Friday, with Twitter flooded with statements from elected leaders, loyal readers, and other journalists.
Ward 5 Councilmember Zachary Parker called the layoffs “devastating.”
Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton wrote on X that “DC will feel the loss of DCist and cuts at WAMU. Democracies need vigorous, active local press corps asking tough questions and breaking critical news.”
“DCist and the journalists who run it provide essential, irreplaceable reporting to keep us informed about what is happening in our community,” Virginia Rep. Don Beyer posted on X. “This is awful news.”
Anyone visiting the DCist site is now confronted with a big orange pop-up message and automatically redirected to WAMU’s homepage:
“Thank you for visiting and supporting DCist. Since 2018, it has been a part of WAMU 88.5, the Washington region’s public media and NPR member station. As of February 23, the site will no longer publish new content. Please visit WAMU.org for local news and programming. You will be automatically redirected to WAMU.org in 15 seconds.”
Out of Ink covers media issues relevant to the DMV. Please send tips, suggestions, or feedback to vmorris@washingtoncitypaper.com and connect with him on X @vincentmorris.