Remember when a small town paper broke a big story and it got pulled from online archives?

Back in 2012 I was living in a small town in Oregon called Oakridge. Our local paper had a series about a chemical spill by a nearby company that made the national news for about a day. Then the paper's website archived the articles, but within a week those links just 404'd. I called the editor and she said the company threatened a lawsuit, so they took them down. I still have a paper copy I clipped from that week, and it bothers me how easy it was to make that story disappear. Has anyone else seen local news coverage vanish like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_ben17d ago

Man I can barely find my truck keys most mornings, let alone a clipped article from 2012... that's real dedication. Crazy how fast those links go poof though, makes you wonder what else just vanished into the void.

smith.jordan16d ago

Honestly I think you're overthinking this a bit. The internet's been around long enough that we know stuff disappears, but most of it isn't really worth saving anyway. Ngl, I've got old bookmarks from 2007 that still work fine, so it's not like everything just vanishes into thin air. And honestly, if a link breaks it's usually because the site owner moved on or the content was just not that important to begin with. Tbh, the real problem is people hoarding digital junk they'll never look at again, not the stuff that fades away naturally.