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Comment by kevinburke | Hacker News Reader

At some point someone who was not billionaire owner Joe Ricketts had to actually type the commands into the website to entirely remove the old content. I don't think that person should have done that, especially because the writers rely on those clips to show new employers to get hired. At the very least that person should have pushed back and allowed writers a week or more to download their best articles to show to new employers.

We need to think pretty hard as an industry about the ethics of the things we are doing and the consequences of our actions on the real world.

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>the writers rely on those clips to show new employers to get hired.

The writers will have their own copies of their clips. Nobody in their right mind would rely on a (potentially ex-) employer as a perpetual source of their material.

Radio reporters save MP3's. TV reporters save DVDs (and sometimes mp4s). Newspaper reporters save PDFs. These journalists should have done the same.

My Twitter feed, which has in the past hour seen a few examples of writers lamenting the fact they don't have clips to show new employers, seems to contradict this point.

Send them to archive.org.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160428013428/gothamist.com/

I'm a freelance journalist. I've done occasional work for Gothamist over the years, mostly interactive maps and data visualizations. Everyone I ever met or worked with from Gothamist or DNAInfo was great, and I'm really sorry to hear this news.

Archiving digital content isn't trivial. A lot of Gothamist pieces are more than just text and static photos.

I actually just sent out a query letter to a publication last week where I included a clip from Gothamist. It included an interactive map built with the Google API--pretty simple to build, thanks to Google's hard work, and it was easy for Gothamist to host on their own servers and iframe in to their CMS.

But it's not easy to archive the whole package offsite. A PDF of the page isn't ideal if I'm selling my ability to deliver a feature with interactivity. Showing the map on its own isn't the same as showing the complete package. I could mirror Gothamist's page on my own hosting, but that raises various issues, and I'd need to take out stuff like their ad and tracking code and hope nothing breaks. (The Internet Archive versions don't work, for whatever reason).

I have the technical skill to deal with that, and in my case I have other clips that show the same abilities so I'll probably just not bother. But I'm sure there are many other journalists, many of them more talented than I am but with different skillsets, who will struggle to archive stories with embedded video, photo slideshows, audio, JS quizzes, etc.

It's good advice for a lot of people and I know I'm not as systematic about it as I should be. If you, say, write for a company blog, and that company goes out of business, your work may be on archive.org but it may be fragmentary and may be hard to find. And if what you wrote was behind pay or registration walls, it's probably not available.

The writing I did for close to ten years is no longer available on the original source. I have most of it either because I directly saved copies or because it was cross-posted on another site. Nothing malicious here. The company just went out of business and its website went away. That's pretty much how it works.

I was an editor at Chicagoist for over a year and am also a web developer. I am assisting some fellow employees with getting their stuff downloaded, luckily a lot of it is safe on Wayback Machine. You'd be surprised how many didn't know about that. Newer stuff is harder, I and others are urging them to get it off Google Cache before it's refreshed.

That said, it's still a pain, for example I have to update multiple websites that link to the site and some of my websites are easier to update than others. It will be easy on some of my newer sites but I have an old Drupal blog that now has a lot of broken links and I'm not excited to update it since I no longer really do Drupal.

OK looks like they may put the archives back up https://twitter.com/andylocal/status/926226031081672709 the fact this is so ham-handed might mean the regular IT employees weren't part of it? I can't remember if we even had anything more than contractors for IT stuff at Ist (I worked there), I do know the CMS was a very out of date copy of Movable Type.

Sounds like he fired every single employee on the spot. I can see the logic behind redirecting the site to a static asset when you have nobody to manage it.

I'm not talking about his logic, I'm talking about the logic of the person he asked to remove all of the content. That person was almost certainly an employee who was also laid off.

The content is still in their CMS somewhere. They just redirected the index to a different page. Could have even been someone who didn't work directly at DNAInfo. Ricketts employs a lot of people.

It doesn't matter. They still shouldn't have done it.

Their announcement is served by Route 53 and CloudFront. If AWS was also hosting their CMS, it could easily be gone now.

It's a tough spot. Ethically you can't spend investors' money when it can't benefit them, and you can't incur hosting bills that won't be paid.

Ex Ist employee here. It's strange because why not keep it up and collect ad revenue? I've written for a fair number of publications that are now defunct and almost all still have their websites up because of ad revenue.

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