A newspaper vanished from the internet. Did someone pay to kill it?

January 3, 2023 10:00 PM

The Hook, a beloved Charlottesville weekly, closed a decade ago but its archives lived on — until its 22,000 stories were suddenly taken offline in June. Former staffers have theories about its mystery buyer.

Spoiler: The leading theory is that an accused rapist who's now an investment banker bought it to kill the public record of the accusations against him.

posted by Etrigan (23 comments total)

This is why I screen shot so much stuff. Yes the Internet is ‘forever’ for most of us, but not ALL of us…
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 10:32 PM on January 3, 2023 [7 favorites]

Streisand Effect.. activate!
posted by Nerd of the North at 12:09 AM on January 4, 2023 [16 favorites]

Streisand Effect.. activate!

As chronicled at The DTM, it took three days after the WP article for a new The Hook archive website to emerge. (The original site is also available via the Wayback Machine, for now.)
posted by progosk at 2:03 AM on January 4, 2023 [19 favorites]

Outsider theory: New buyer is actually Blues Traveller.
posted by dr_dank at 4:19 AM on January 4, 2023 [18 favorites]

Well the Hook does bring you back...
posted by gc at 5:59 AM on January 4, 2023 [6 favorites]

The last few years have made me so cynical that I'm wondering if this is WaPo's subtle attempt to solicit a buyout bigger than The Hook got.
posted by panglos at 6:18 AM on January 4, 2023 [4 favorites]

what's truly wonderful here is that this Washington DC player-wannabe went to all this time and expense to purge the internet of mentions of the long-ago rape he likely committed but that had been nearly forgotten-- and by doing so, his hometown paper, with an immense global readership, made sure that everyone he knows and works with learns all about it.

And good luck trying to buy and erase the Post's online archive.
posted by martin q blank at 6:46 AM on January 4, 2023 [13 favorites]

are we inhabiting that narrow slice of history where the state of networked communications and human societies are yielding some of the least predictable and most erratic behaviours/sequences, shortly before it all gets locked down in one comprehensively restrictive/ed system?
posted by elkevelvet at 7:20 AM on January 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

Well the Hook does bring you back...

On this you can rely.
posted by Servo5678 at 7:27 AM on January 4, 2023 [4 favorites]

idiot was probably thinking about getting into politics
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:48 AM on January 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

This is why I screen shot so much stuff.

If you're going to take the time to screenshot, save it via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine so there is a publicly accessible copy. If you create a free account, you can build a personal web archive of saved items to have a central reference point. This is a good example of why citizen archiving of the web can be important.

There is a browser plug-in (Chrome, Firefox, Safari) that makes saving very easy, and also will show you archived versions where available when you hit a broken link elsewhere.
posted by ryanshepard at 7:56 AM on January 4, 2023 [23 favorites]

Man, the Washington Post's editors have really had it out for Betteridge's law of headlines recently, haven't they?
posted by The Lurkers Support Me in Email at 8:14 AM on January 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

One drawback of the Internet Archive is that in cases like this, the website owner can request to be removed from the index for any reason and the Internet Archive will comply and remove all the archived material.
posted by Lanark at 8:22 AM on January 4, 2023 [10 favorites]

One drawback of the Internet Archive is that in cases like this, the website owner can request to be removed from the index for any reason and the Internet Archive will comply and remove all the archived material.

For anything that might need to be twisted in the guts of the rich and powerful, there are smaller alternatives unlikely to reply to takedown notices or worry about the DMCA - e.g. archive.fo. Lots of copies keep things safe, as they say.
posted by ryanshepard at 8:47 AM on January 4, 2023 [6 favorites]

If you’re going to do this, just do it publicly as if you were making an investment by buying the paper. Then you can badly mismanage it, strip and sell the assets, squeeze out every ounce of equity and credit, and shut it down. Works for private equity all the time, no one will question what happened.
posted by star gentle uterus at 8:55 AM on January 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

The two biggest and most influential alt-weeklies in Canada, Toronto's NOW and Vancouver's The Georgia Straight were purchased in 2019 and 2020 respectively by Media Central which "positioned itself as an innovative disrupter," in the linked article. Of course, the pandemic caused a huge hit in advertising, and the article goes on to say:

In the midst of this economic turmoil, Media Central announced it would be merging editorial, marketing and sales, and refocusing editorial at Now Magazine and the Straight on health, education, finance and esports, eliminating its traditional focus on arts and venues.

And since then, the tale went... exactly as well as you might imagine:

In March 2022, Media Central defaulted on a $1.1-million payment owed to its debenture holders. Later that month, it entered bankruptcy and was dissolved. The same month, [NOW acting editor-in-chief Radheyan] Simonpillai announced that Now would only be printing monthly for the time being.

Both Now and the Georgia Straight are still able to operate as independent entities — however, because they are assets of a now bankrupt company, the debenture holders are trying to sell them off to recoup their losses.

Great.

Full disclosure: at a younger and more foolish stage of my life, I toiled for a year or two as the section editor of a Thursday weekly. I picked up a copy in December for the first time in a few years. I realize this is right before Christmas when things are always a little slack, but it was a scrawny pamphlet, with all of eight pieces of content in it (and I think it is now published monthly). Lord Northcliffe once wrote, "News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising." By my count, seven of the eight pieces were basically ads -- lightly rewritten press releases about what was going on this month at the art gallery or how a hometown boy is now playing professional sports. The only thing that was not was an editorial about local government's housing policy.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:34 AM on January 4, 2023 [6 favorites]

I can’t read the WP story, but I presume they name the investment banker in question.

He is named in progosk's link, but we — including me, of course — are choosing not to name him.
posted by jamjam at 9:58 AM on January 4, 2023

I was just lamenting to Shepherd recently about the death of the alt weekly. I miss them! It was a great way to: get local news stories, really offbeat or investigative journalism, find out what arts and music were happening in whatever town your weekly is based in, restaurant reviews, etc. For me, the internet can't really replace it very well unless the alt weekly moved online. Where I live now there is no condensed website or page that can tell me what is happening in music/art/theatre; everything is scattershot.

Creative Loafing ATL was the alt-weekly that was my post barista shift read in the early 00s; I'd go have a few drinks and flip through and find out the haps. Ah, those were the days. IIRC, the Loaf is still a thing?
posted by Kitteh at 11:19 AM on January 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

I can’t read the WP story, but I presume they name the investment banker in question.

WaPo gift link
posted by ryanshepard at 11:36 AM on January 4, 2023

So is there any chance of this stuff being hosted elsewhere? Or is it a copyright thing?
posted by gottabefunky at 10:20 AM on January 5, 2023

As mentioned above, it is currently being hosted at https://readthehook.net/, while the original site www.readthehook.com is mirrored at the Archive.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 10:50 AM on January 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

I enjoyed reading The Hook and the deliciousness of the WaPo igniting the Streisand Effect is superb.

I wonder if individuals/corporations interested in buying bodies of work like The Hook's will start including clauses in their contracts about guaranteeing the transfer of all known backups and/or consequential damages if someone suddenly pops up and makes that material available for free.

Lastly, with grand pomposity, I continue to declare that despite everything The Hook claims about "the Hook" being a nickname for C'ville, I have never seen evidence it ever was a nickname beyond said claim. ::rests case::
posted by Atreides at 2:07 PM on January 5, 2023

How much would it cost to buy an old weekly like that? Like $250,000?
posted by PHINC at 9:58 PM on January 5, 2023