Joe Ricketts
New York hyperlocal startup DNAinfo launches in Chicago
The inaugural DNAinfo site has been a hit in New York in terms of traffic, buzz and newsbreaks.
It has yet to be seen whether the site is making any money from its hybrid business model of hyperlocal display advertising and additional revenue streams like sponsored events. More
DNAinfo, in bid to raise profile among local advertisers, starts 'Small Business Insider'
"Small Business Insider," which launched today, is "a premium video series that highlights the city’s most innovative and unique neighborhood businesses," according to a press release. More
Joe Ricketts hosts a Manhattan fund-raiser with John McCain
Joe Ricketts, the billionaire founder of local news site DNAInfo and conservative mega-donor, will host a breakfast fund-raiser for Arizona Senate candidate Jeff Flake at his apartment in the Time Warner Center on October 1.
The special guest is Senator John McCain.
Ricketts got some unwanted attention earlier this election cycle, when a proposed plan to spend $10 million on a series of ads attacking President Obama for his connections to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright leaked to the New York Times. More
Inside billionaire Joe Ricketts' dreams of media empire
Ricketts is somewhat enigmatic. He’s not a recluse, but he seldom gives interviews, preferring instead to speak to his public, such as it is, directly, either through occasional blog posts on his personal website, or the professionally edited shorts that reside on his YoutTube channel. He is not a player in the digital media scene; not among its savants, its big-name consultants or its bankrollers, whether they’re do-good charities or venture firms. He is active in politics, but he pays into his political activities directly; there is no discernible political agenda to DNAinfo, and if anything the site seems to skew against determining the course of the conversation, focusing instead on breaking straight news and saturating at the pavement rather than the council chamber and the executive offices of government or the boardrooms of the city’s power elites. More
Anti-Rangel super PAC solicits small donors, echoes Espaillat
The anti-incumbent super PAC that's targeting Charlie Rangel is now soliciting small-dollar donations for its campaign to unseat the 42-year incumbent.
"Perhaps no single incumbent politician deserves to be fired more than the ethically-challenged Rangel," wrote Eric O'Keefe, the co-chairman of the Campaign for Primary Accountability in an email to supporters this morning. More
In a memo, Ricketts tells his news staff his politics have 'absolutely no impact' on their work
Ricketts tells his staff in the memo, obtained by Capital, that "although I feel a strong obligation as a citizen to engage politically in support of the principles I hold dear, I feel equally strongly that my personal politics should have absolutely no impact on your work as objective, fair-minded journalists." Whole thing after the jump. More
Joe Ricketts and the war on message
A funny corollary to the rise of corporate-backed super PACs is that they have, at times, been enormously inconvenient for political campaigns wishing to spoon-feed narratives to the media. More
The Joe Ricketts agenda hasn't always worked out well for the G.O.P.
Even without a $10 million, Jeremiah Wright-themed ad campaign, conservative billionaire Joe Ricketts is poised to have an outsize effect on the 2012 cycle.
But it might not be all bad for Democrats. More
With an anti-Obama attack plan, DNAinfo owner Joe Ricketts comes out of his shell
One thing not mentioned in today's bombshell article in The New York Times about billionaire Joe Ricketts, the man behind a Super PAC campaign to revive the issue of pastor Jeremiah Wright in the 2012 election cycle? More
(2)After beating both tabloids to the tale of Madam Gristina, DNAinfo has the 'News' and 'Post' in a sweat
DNAinfo's 30-person staff includes half a dozen refugees from the tabloids, said de Kretser, including Weiss, who stunned media watchers when he suddenly left the Post after 25 years in June of 2010 only to resurface at a curiously named website that no one had heard of.
De Kretser herself is a former Post staffer, and recently nabbed another veteran of her erstwhile employer, William Gorta, to join her growing stable of web journalists.
Gorta's final week at the Post is turning out to be an eventful one: A scene of "consternation" in the newsroom yesterday was described to Capital by people familiar with the situation. More
