Gongol.com Archives: March 2025
March 10, 2025
ABC News has abruptly shut down the polling-focused website FiveThirtyEight, obliterating the domain's content and redirecting traffic to the ABC News "Politics" page. Some story content can still be recovered by the names of individual "538" authors, like G. Elliott Morris, but the projects page is no longer visible. ABC is also cutting and consolidating elsewhere in its news division. ■ 538 alumni like Morris are understandably angry that their work has been functionally erased. The pre-erasure site was expansive and contained reporting, data, and interactive projects -- and though some content can still be retrieved from Archive.org's Wayback Machine, the way ABC obliterated the original site comes across like a form of digital arson. ■ Media jobs have long been precarious occupations. The itinerant radio DJ was a trope long before Dr. Johnny Fever and Harry Chapin's ballad about WOLD. But there is something different to the erasure that comes with being terminated from a media job in the digital era. ■ Being laid off by a media company is distressing enough. To have them nuke an entire body of work on the employee's way out the door (as is now the routine practice) is insulting. Libraries don't just purge their stacks of the books, magazines, and newspapers written by people who are no longer employed. That's not how civilization works. ■ Civilization is a cumulative process, and the people who document civilization's changes (one might even call them "journalists") think of themselves as playing a role in that accumulation. Even if it was work for hire, the journalist often still holds a sense of pride in the creation and sees its destruction as a mad act of needless vandalism. ■ Not everything is worth preserving in the Library of Congress, of course, but the wanton destruction of so much long-tail media content both diminishes the ongoing reputational equity of media outlets and encourages journalists to seek individual celebrity status that is bigger than the status of the outlets themselves. That's a recipe for long-term institutional decay, and there is little reason to believe it will be good for the public interest in the long term.
