The Mysterious Disappearance (And Reappearance) of Jezebel s Archives

Over the course of the last few days, a huge number of articles at the feminist website Jezebel went offline, many of them investigative and analytical stories concerning subjects like abortion, sex, rape, pornography and pedophilia. Former Jezebel staffers—including me—began receiving messages from people familiar with the site’s current owners, the media company Paste, warning us to check our own archives and try to preserve what we could of our work.

According to people familiar with the current workings of the company, William Sagan, the company’s publisher, had been on a “mass deletion spree” after an advertising and analytics company generated a list of 4,000 articles on the site whose headlines were “not brand safe,” according to a text message I viewed. (In a brief email exchange, Sagan appeared to dispute this version of events, but his comment was not clearly written and it was impossible for me to figure out definitively what he was trying to say. He did not answer several followup emails I sent trying to clarify his statement.)

I worked at Jezebel and its then–parent companies Gawker Media, Gizmodo Media Group, and G/O Media, for five rather turbulent years, from 2014 to 2019. (The number of name changes alone may signal to the reader just how turbulent it was.) When I went to look for various stories of mine on Wednesday, they were, indeed, gone. An investigative series I wrote about a dubious lawsuit accusing Donald Trump of raping a 13-year-old: all gone. A story about three teenage rape victims in Oklahoma who were bullied out of school after identifying their attacker: gone. A story I’d written following a woman with an apparent delusional or “ghost” pregnancy, where I’d gotten access to the rarely-seen courtroom inside Bellevue Hospital: gone. My former colleague Stassa Edwards discovered that much of what she’d written about the infamously lenient judgment against Stanford swimmer and convicted rapist Brock Turner had disappeared. An interview that writer Jia Tolentino did with a woman who had an abortion at 32 weeks after she found out her baby would never survive outside the womb: gone. My former colleague Clover Hope, an industry-leading arts and culture writer, found just one of her own articles still online, after many years at the company. 

Nor did many of my own stories that had disappeared have anything to do with topics like abortion or rape; for instance, a series of stories I wrote about ridiculous Trump administration official Sebastian Gorka were also gone, including one about him reportedly taking a bag with a gun inside it through a TSA checkpoint. (Gorka said he’d picked up his a bag containing his wife’s unloaded pistol by mistake.) My former colleague Joanna Rothkopf even found that one of her most lighthearted (and viral) pieces had disappeared, about her experience wearing an enormous elecric green dinosaur-esque tail for a week. (I still cannot find that piece, but thankfully, the video still lives on YouTube.)

The Washington Post reported that over 100 articles at Jezebel were removed, but staffers currently working at Jezebel and Splinter, another former Gizmodo Media site now owned by Paste, estimated the true number to be much higher. Splinter editor-in-chief Jacob Weindling told me in an exchange on Bluesky that he thought at least 1,000 Jezebel and Splinter articles had been removed; and a thorough spreadsheet of removed posts began circulating among current and former Jezebel and Splinter reporters. (In all, about 49 of my own stories were included on that list.) The writer Eoin Higgins wrote on Bluesky that he’d linked to a still-live Jezebel article to explain something in a piece he was writing; by the time an editor reached the piece, the article he’d referred to was gone.

When reached for comment on Wednesday, Sagan, the Paste publisher, told me, “The contention in your second paragraph is inaccurate.” In the second paragraph of my email to him I had written, “I’m told that you were the person who was in charge of this decision, which was undertaken to make Jezebel more ‘brand safe.’”

In other words, Sagan appeared to dispute either that he’d been the person to remove the stories, or else that the decision to remove them had been made with “brand safety” in mind. He was slightly clearer with the Post, writing that “while “no article has ever been deleted from Jezebel,” the site will “occasionally move old articles into draft status for a multitude of reasons” including those that have broken links or outdated third-party content, or “to fix significant content or grammar problems or for other reasons.”

Former Jezebel journalist Kylie Cheung also contacted Paste for comment, wondering why articles on the site had been apparently removed and what standards at the company had changed to necessitate those removals. In emails that Cheung shared with me, Sagan told her that her statement that articles had been removed from Jezebel was “inaccurate and defamatory,” and that articles using the word “abortion” in the headline were still live on the site, as well as “thousands of other articles which use abortion in the text of the article.” 

“Your derogatory comments regarding Jezebel are without foundation,” Sagan wrote. (Cheung had not, as far as I have seen, actually made derogatory or “defamatory” claims about Jezebel.) “The editorial policy of Jezebel has not changed and will not change. No one tells Jezebel editors what stories to write and publish. You owe Jezebel an apology.” 

And then there was another twist: on Thursday morning, some of the articles that had disappeared came back online—missing not just their accompanying art, but their bylines. (In another brief email exchange, Sagan asked me to identify stories missing their bylines, but did not respond to other questions.) All of my stories published before 2018—most of my stories, that is—are now missing my byline, making them harder to search for and impacting how accessible my older work is to find. Other stories by former Jezebel authors are still inaccessible, although it is difficult to tell how many in total remain offline. A few of my own pieces are also still offline, with 404 “Page not found” in their place.

“We accelerated the article review and reposted the articles,” Sagan told The Washington Post, although he did not specify what the review entailed or who undertook it.

All of this comes at the end of a long bout of difficulties for Jezebel, which is no longer as robust an outlet as it was when I worked there.  The site and Splinter were sold to Paste by G/O Media in November 2023, after briefly shutting down earlier that month. At the time, Josh Jackson, Paste’s co-founder and editor-in-chief, said he wanted the site to “push boundaries,” telling the New York Times that he believed “there are advertisers out there who have the courage to go to where the audience is.” The site’s staff has indisputably shrunk since then, however; it is currently without an editor-in-chief after its most recent EIC Lauren Tousignant resigned in April. The site’s current masthead lists eight total people working for the site, including just one full-time staff writer. 

Disappeared stories take with them not just a valuable archive of news, but important piece of culture, humor, and analysis, the kind of human-made work that’s even more valuable as the internet gets swallowed by a tide of AI slop. And disappearing stories are not, of course, a problem limited to just Jezebel or Splinter. The archives of the women’s humor site The Hairpin shut down in 2018, before returning from the dead in 2024 as a depressing AI-addled site full of weird crap. Eventually, its archives were saved and brought back online through a Kickstarter fundraiser by the independent media site Flaming Hydra and a lot of hard unpaid work by writers who cared about the site. (Disclosure: I’m also a Flaming Hydra contributor.)

Usually, though, there’s not a happy ending to disappeared internet writing. “Link rot,” for instance, is a pervasive problem, where hyperlinks stop working and sometimes render articles unreadable or sites impossible to navigate. What’s on the internet feels increasingly ephemeral, shifting with time and changing technology. But it’s much more unusual for a publisher to apparently proactively decide to unpublish stories, even for, as Sagan would have it, “significant content or grammar problems or for other reasons.” One of the few examples I could think of myself is when Buzzfeed was found to have deleted about 4,000 previously published stories; news that was broken, ironically enough, by Jezebel’s now very dead sister site Gawker.

Nor is there any guarantee that what’s been saved at Jezbel and Splinter won’t eventually disappear again, or that our bylines will return to our posts. Besides being a lesson in impermanence, and backing up your own work in a form that cannot be removed by anyone else’s whims or ideas about brand safety, the incident, along with Jezebel’s continued attrition, left some former Jezebel writers convinced that the site now needs a radically new direction to survive in any form.

“Jezebel will turn 20 next spring, and the site needs a different owner if it has any hope of surviving long-term,” former Jezebel senior writer and founder of Autonomy News Susan Rinkunas told me. “Jezebel deserves a steward who knows its worth and cultural importance and one who, importantly, knows that ad-supported media is dead. Bill Sagan is not that person. He may have helped save Jezebel from private equity greed three years ago, but he is slowly killing this deeply influential publication.”