Slate: “On Thursday morning, a rumor started to circulate among media workers. Vice senior editor Janus Rose disclosed that staffers were in possession of an anonymous tip that management planned to shutter Vice—and delete the entire website. Employees had noticed the company disabled a Google feature that allowed them to download their emails. “Fun times in the media death spiral!!!” Rose wrote on X. “Will update once I know whether or not we’re all fired.” Another Vice staffer, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, said that the brand’s journalists spent the day downloading their articles as PDFs and saving links on public archive websites like the Wayback Machine. By the day’s end, the company’s management announced that Vice’s website would cease publishing typical news stories and that it would soon lay off hundreds of people. The plan was to pivot away from real journalism and toward a “studio model” involving, uh, um, social media? “As part of this shift, we will no longer publish content on vice.com, instead putting more emphasis on our social channels as we accelerate our discussions with partners to take our content to where it will be viewed most broadly,” CEO Bruce Dixon wrote in an email to staff. In a separate memo on Friday, obtained by Semafor, staff were told: “Our website will remain. We are however making an intentional decision for it to show up in a different way.” (Vice did not respond to Slate for a request for comment). But the idea that Vice may be deleted was not an irrational worry. News websites have been disappeared before: The contents of the website Gawker were deleted after it was successfully sued by Hulk Hogan and its former parent company went bankrupt. (Fortunately, the Freedom of the Press Foundation and the Internet Archive were able to preserve the archive.) Gawker was revived, and then went kaput again; Gawker.com is currently devoid of articles. In January, the not-quite-a-year-old website the Messenger vanished similarly when its owner, billionaire Jimmy Finkelstein, closed up shop and shut down the website with little notice. Go to the site now, and all you’ll see is a white screen with the name of the brand, and a general email address. (Earlier this month, Finkelstein told Axios he gave ex-employees passwords to log back into the website and try to rescue old stories, and that he’s “considering” making the content public again.) And, as of Friday morning, the DCist has been shut down—traffic at this time redirects to WAMU, the public radio station that had overseen it. The site has, effectively, disappeared. “To facilitate transitions for impacted staff, WAMU has made the DCist archive available through a password-protected site through March 31, 2024,” a statement from WAMU shared with Slate said…”