TIL my local news site blocked a story about a chemical spill near the river

Last month I found a post on a regional forum about a chemical spill that happened 3 years ago near the Ohio River. The news site I follow never ran it, and the forum post said it got taken down from the local paper's website. Has anyone else seen news vanish like that from small town outlets?

2 comments

2 Comments

taraw161mo ago

A server crash losing a whole month of articles sounds more like bad IT planning than anything else, but that's a different thing from a story getting actively removed from the site. If it was a glitch, you'd usually see a broken link or a 404, not the whole post just gone like it never existed.

roberts.jordan1mo ago

You mentioned "got taken down from the local paper's website," and I just wanna gently push back on that a bit. Small town news outlets are usually run by like two exhausted people (sometimes just one person), so stories sometimes get quietly deleted because of technical glitches, expired web hosting, or the editor straight up forgot to renew the domain. I remember my hometown paper once "lost" a whole month of articles because their server crashed and they didn't have backups, not because anyone was trying to hide anything. Not saying shady stuff never happens, but disappearing stories in small papers is often more about incompetence than conspiracy, you know?