Just found out a local paper in Brazil got shut down for reporting on river pollution in 2022

I was digging through some old links about water contamination and stumbled on this story from a small town in Minas Gerais. The paper had been running a series about how a nearby mining operation was dumping waste into the Rio das Velhas. Then suddenly their website went dark and the editor told a journalist friend that they got threatened with legal fees they couldn't pay. I tried to pull up the articles through archive sites but most were scrubbed even from cache. It took me reaching out to a university professor there to get a PDF of one piece. Makes me wonder how many other local outlets just vanish quietly without anyone outside noticing. Anyone else ever tried tracking down a buried story from a small town like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

gavins4317d ago

Yeah, I'd actually echo what you said about the Wayback Machine. I managed to pull a defunct community newsletter from rural Oklahoma that way after someone threatened them over a piece about faulty water meters. It wasn't perfect - some image links were broken and the text got garbled in parts - but it gave me enough scraps to piece together the original reporting.

loganburns17d ago

Wait did you try the Wayback Machine for that paper? I found a pharmacy blog once that went totally dark after exposing a scam.