Found a deleted post about a 2019 factory fire in Ohio that got taken down

I was looking up old news articles for a project and found a cached version of a local forum post from Cincinnati. Someone had shared photos of smoke damage from a chemical plant fire that happened five years ago, but the original post vanished within a day. The user said they were told it was 'bad for business' to keep it up. Has anyone else seen a local story get scrubbed like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_riley1mo ago

Local news sites get bought up by big companies all the time. Those new owners kill stories that make their other business partners look bad. It's not just about one post, it's about who owns the website now. Check if that forum got bought by a media group around that time.

king.kevin1mo ago

Kill stories" is putting it nicely. More like corporate memory hole.

hannah_williams2d ago

I dug into a similar thing with a story about a local factory dumping waste into a creek. The original article just disappeared from the town paper's site, but I found it in the Wayback Machine from a week before. Turns out the paper got bought by a chain that had investments in waste management companies. I downloaded the whole page and saved screenshots, then emailed the reporter directly. She said the editor got a call from the new owners and that was it. So yeah, check who owns the site now, and save everything you find offline before it vanishes for good.