A D.C. jazz singer started a blog to replace DCist. The site’s billionaire owner is threatening to sue him for $100,000.

By Aaron Gregg November 9

Aaron Myers was furious when he heard that Joe Ricketts, the billionaire chief executive of the company that owns D.C. local news blog DCist, had abruptly shuttered the site after employees voted to unionize. Myers, a 34-year-old Dallas native who has been active in D.C.’s jazz community since he moved here in 2008, says he saw the move as an affront to the community.

So he bought the DCistNow.com domain name and on Monday launched a local news blog of his own.

In the site’s introductory post, he was critical of Ricketts’s decision to close DCist, and he described his site as an effort to fill the void. He hopes to recruit DCist’s former reporters to write for his new site and eventually pay them as freelancers. ... “It was (and is) my goal to have a community resource (blog) that is based in DC, that will be a consistent source of quality information filled with innovation, integrity, and that same investigative spirit that I believe the DCist and many other blogs possess,” Myers wrote. “I do not take kindly to outsiders trying to disrupt my home.”

Ricketts does not appear to have the same enthusiasm for Myers’s idea. On Wednesday Partridge Partners, an intellectual property law firm representing DCist’s parent firm DNAinfo, contacted Myers requesting that he cease and desist.
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This story has been updated to reflect the correct job title of Joe Ricketts, and to include subsequent comment from DNAinfo.

Aaron Gregg covers the Washington-area economy and defense contractors for Capital Business, The Post’s local business section. He studied music (Jazz guitar) and political science at Emory University in Atlanta, and has a graduate degree in public policy from Georgetown. Follow @Post_AG

Meanwhile in D.C.
by Rachel Sadon November 14, 2017 at 10:00 am