I heard about the new Thomas Frank article, "The Odious Presidency of Bill Clinton", posted at Salon. I've always been a Thomas Frank fan and looked forward to reading it. But when I clicked the link to go to the article, I got the dreaded 404 error. The article had been deleted.
Wow. This is weird, I thought. I've been reading Salon for over a decade, and I've never seen this happen before. So after spending almost an hour trying to find a copy, a friend pointed me to the exact same article, still on Salon's servers, but with a different URL (web address).
How did this happen, I wondered? Why would an online publication deliberately break the link to one of their articles, so that Google couldn't even find it, just as that article was starting to go viral?
This is what appears to have happened. The way Salon's web publishing system works is that when a new article is posted, it gets a web address that is made up of the name of the article and the date it was posted.
The original article posting occurred on Mar. 13 at 11:50 PM EST, so it's URL looks like this:
Original URL: salon.com/2016/03/13/bill_clintons_odious_presidency_thomas_frank_on_the_real_history_of_the_90s/
Then on Mar. 14 at 03:50 AM UTC, the original article was deleted, and then re-posted killing the old URL and creating a new URL.
New URL: salon.com/2016/03/14/bill_clintons_odious_presidency_thomas_frank_on_the_real_history_of_the_90s/
Now, one must understand that when an online publication gets a viral story, it is publishing gold, and therefore, so is the URL to that that story. As a former web publisher, I can tell you that if someone ever broke the link to a story we had that was going viral, that person would be terminated.
Frequently, when you see an old article that's web address is broken, it's because that publication has an archived that article and they want you to buy it. Or maybe it's a really old article and they just don't value history. It happens.
I have never, however, seen an online publication break the link to one of its articles while it's still an active story, much less one that is in the process of going viral.
Someone at Salon almost certainly broke this link on purpose. There was zero reason to delete the article, and then repost it but for the sole purpose of keeping people from being able to find it.
Looks like Salon is due a personal adjustment -- which may or may not involve a raise.