Why Sites Like Gawker and the Messenger Go Blank—and Why It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way

On Thursday morning, a rumor started to circulate among media workers. Vice senior editor Janus Rose disclosed that staffers were in possession of an anonymous tip that management planned to shutter Vice—and delete the entire website. Employees had noticed the company disabled a Google feature that allowed them to download their emails. “Fun times in the media death spiral!!!” Rose wrote on X. “Will update once I know whether or not we’re all fired.”

Another Vice staffer, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, said that the brand’s journalists spent the day downloading their articles as PDFs and saving links on public archive websites like the Wayback Machine.

By the day’s end, the company’s management announced that Vice’s website would cease publishing typical news stories and that it would soon lay off hundreds of people. The plan was to pivot away from real journalism and toward a “studio model” involving, uh, um, social media? “As part of this shift, we will no longer publish content on vice.com, instead putting more emphasis on our social channels as we accelerate our discussions with partners to take our content to where it will be viewed most broadly,” CEO Bruce Dixon wrote in an email to staff. In a separate memo on Friday, obtained by Semafor, staff were told: “Our website will remain. We are however making an intentional decision for it to show up in a different way.” (Vice did not respond to Slate for a request for comment).

But the idea that Vice may be deleted was not an irrational worry. News websites have been disappeared before: The contents of the website Gawker were deleted after it was successfully sued by Hulk Hogan and its former parent company went bankrupt. (Fortunately, the Freedom of the Press Foundation and the Internet Archive were able to preserve the archive.) Gawker was revived, and then went kaput again; Gawker.com is currently devoid of articles. In January, the not-quite-a-year-old website the Messenger vanished similarly when its owner, billionaire Jimmy Finkelstein, closed up shop and shut down the website with little notice. Go to the site now, and all you’ll see is a white screen with the name of the brand, and a general email address. (Earlier this month, Finkelstein told Axios he gave ex-employees passwords to log back into the website and try to rescue old stories, and that he’s “considering” making the content public again.) And, as of Friday morning, the DCist has been shut down—traffic at this time redirects to WAMU, the public radio station that had overseen it. The site has, effectively, disappeared. “To facilitate transitions for impacted staff, WAMU has made the DCist archive available through a password-protected site through March 31, 2024,” a statement from WAMU shared with Slate said.

Trone Dowd, a former reporter for both Vice and the Messenger, has seen his clips at an outlet deleted twice—once at the Messenger, and once at a local paper, the Queens Tribune. At the Messenger, an editor, David Ewalt, took a chance on him and let him cover a new beat—video games. “I was able to build six months’ worth of strong clips. It was the only tangible showcase of my ability to cover the video games industry day in and day out with a bit of teeth,” Dowd said in an email. “By wiping all of my work from the internet without warning, I’m basically relying on prospective employers to either ask me for clips (I have them in Google Docs) or for colleagues at other publications and sources I’d built relationships with to vouch that I’d been decent at the job.”

Joshua Keating, a former Messenger reporter who left for a job at Vox before the site shut down, said that multiple decisions by the company’s management have left him without valuable clips. The Messenger bought his previous employer, Grid News, before launching, so now work from two different jobs is mostly inaccessible to the internet—unless you know exactly what to search for on a third-party service. “I have the text of all of my stuff, but it’s frustrating because there’s two years of work that can’t be found on Google,” said Keating, who is also a former editor at Slate.

Why would a shuttering news operation—especially one owned by rich billionaires, like the Messenger—choose to wipe its website?

The answer probably isn’t because of legal concerns, experts told me. You can imagine a scenario in which someone comes out of the woodwork and gets angry about a years-old piece and decides to sue. But “generally, deleting news archives wouldn’t eliminate liability arising from the published content (if you’re thinking of, say, potential libel or privacy claims), because the liability arises at the time of publication,” said Jonathan Peters, a media law professor at the University of Georgia. (In some cases, he said, it could reduce the amount of civil damages awarded if it’s seen to be mitigating harm.) David Greene, the civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, noted that it’s challenging to extract damages from a defunct company like the Messenger, and even if a business stays operational like Vice plans to do, the statute of limitations on defamation claims is no more than two years in any U.S. state.

But there are technical challenges around maintaining a defunct website. Greg Lavallee, Slate’s vice president of technology, was kind enough to clue me in on those. There are innumerable problems with maintaining the original website—links, code scripts, and ad networks can quickly present security risks if not properly monitored and maintained. “It wouldn’t be expensive to maintain the content,” Lavallee explained. “It would be expensive to maintain functionality: logins, membership programs, commenting systems, anything that has any kind of user input or interaction.”

Lavallee suggested that media execs—or anyone looking to archive a defunct site—use the free, open-source project Webrecorder, which allows people to effectively download full archives of their sites and then host the archive instead of the original site: “You need to make a copy that’s frozen, but frozen in an intelligent manner.” The only cost would be for hosting the site.

One executive at a major media company, speaking on condition of anonymity, told me it is “very, very cheap to host an archive of static pages for a large website—like a few hundred dollars a month, with the cost entirely dependent on how much traffic it gets.” (Traffic to a defunct site would, predictably, fall and ad networks can quickly become co-opted by bad actors running malware, Lavallee said, noting it wouldn’t be worth it to try to monetize remaining traffic.) Sure, a few hundred dollars a month is not nothing—and if you’re a media exec who has created a dumpster fire that you are trying to move on from, it’s probably really annoying! For a billionaire media owner like Finkelstein or a media company that was once valued at $5.7 billion like Vice (which, yes, has since filed for bankruptcy), this shouldn’t be an insurmountable cost.

In fact, this is a vanishingly small cost to pay so writers can have easy access to their work, and so your company didn’t publish journalism for decades only for it to fall into the web’s memory hole.

Of course, there are people doing vital work to archive the internet. There’s the aptly named Internet Archive, the nonprofit running the Wayback Machine, which allows people to search for old versions of altered or deleted webpages. There’s the Archive Team, a volunteer group that according to one account has already spent six months archiving Vice’s stories in various languages and publishing on the Internet Archive. There’s Archive.today, which makes it easy for anyone to archive a given webpage. And there are helpful paid tools like Authory that allow writers to scrape their stories across different websites and keep a simple version of them in one central place—an insurance policy in case anything happens.

But it shouldn’t fall on journalists to scramble like this. Most journalists aren’t paid like media executives: certainly not ones like Vice founder Shane Smith, who reportedly made off with $100 million; or former Vice CEO Nancy Dubuc, who collected a $1.5 million annual salary despite never successfully selling the company in five years of trying; or the five different Vice executives who each made more than $700,000 per year, as was disclosed as the company went bankrupt; or the Messenger’s owner Jimmy Finkelstein, who, despite being a literal billionaire, suggested he could save the startup $1 million per year in expenses by stepping down; or the Messenger’s editor-in-chief Dan Wakeford, who was given a $900,000 salary even though the company allegedly didn’t have enough money by the end of its $50 million run to even pay employees severance (something Finkelstein says he is now considering doing).

There are a lot of bad things a media company can do. You can take money from private-equity vultures and hand them the company in bankruptcy; you can overpay executives while your site is failing and has no serious path to financial success; you can hire journalists and underpay them and overwork them and lay them off, possibly without proper legal notice; and you can make a mockery of the company you and your employees helped build.

But the worst thing a media company can do is erase a website. Insult to injury doesn’t begin to describe it.