The closure of BuzzFeed News this week followed a familiar script for those who have followed the rise and fall of digital media. There were Twitter eulogies from current and former staff and op-eds on who was to blame for the site’s mismanagement.
Bosses promised to keep the BuzzFeed News site online as an archive, which means, like so many other failed online projects, whatever happened to be on the homepage that day will now be frozen in time forever. In this case: a feature on the history of Midge, Barbie’s pregnant sidekick, an explainer on what to do after “overdosing” on weed and a review of Le Creuset’s new “shallot” cookware shade, which called the color “the trend child of millennial pink and Alison Roman’s shallot pasta”.
BuzzFeed News will join an internet graveyard of shut-down sites, where homepages are left to memorialize whatever made headlines on the day a media brand tells its employees to return their work laptops.
The Gawker reboot, which ceased publishing in February, still hosts a front page that will for ever commemorate the lead up to the 2023 Oscars: its main story is about Andrea Riseborough’s best actress scandal. Next to it are pieces on George Santos’s affinity for Disney karaoke, and the fact that a man wolf-whistled at Kate Middleton during her tip to Leeds.
Input and the Outline – two millennial culture sites that, like Gawker 2.0, were also killed off after being acquired by Bustle Digital Group – endured similar fates. Input, which lasted until September of last year, shut down on the same day it posted an interview with Cameron Winklevoss, the crypto investor played by Armie Hammer in The Social Network.
Two years earlier, the Outline closed at the height of the Covid pandemic, with an essay by Leah Finnegan that connected her experience learning how to dye fabrics with a recently discovered letter from her great-grandmother.
It’s eerie to see just how quickly some sites cut off. Journalists are used to working through precarious times and often have no clue exactly when a site will fold.
Occasionally, editors are allowed a bit of dignity – or at least given warning of their site’s impending doom – enough so they can write goodbye letters to their readers. That was the case for Splinter, a buzzy politics blog that died in 2019. The site’s farewell post lives alongside a Fox & Friends interview of a Trump fan eating a diner breakfast that included a comically large amount of fried eggs.
Lena Dunham’s Lenny Letter, the sports blog Grantland, and the Awl, which covered culture, are also unintentional time capsules.
The Awl’s co-founder Alex Balk referenced the phenomenon of ghost sites in his obituary to the site, writing: “The archives will remain up, but I hope they degrade in the way everything on the internet does.”
The feminist humor website the Toast died a few months before the 2016 election, when then nominee Hillary Clinton wrote its send-off. Her post reads like a campaign speech: “As we look back at what this site has meant to so many of you, I hope you’ll also look forward and consider how you might make your voice heard in whatever arenas matter most to you,” she wrote.
More than 950 readers commented on the piece, and the section oozes with dramatic irony for anyone reading it in 2023. “Toastie President is the most comforting thought I have ever had about a politician,” one commenter wrote.
Feministing, the blog co-founded by the writer Jessica Valenti, wrapped up at the end of 2019. The homepage features a piece written by the reproductive rights organizer Senti Sojwal titled: “Abortion access improves lives”.
In it, Sojwal wrote: “When we have control over the timing and circumstances of our births, parents and children have greater opportunity to live their best lives possible –and that is what it truly means to be pro-life,” Sojwal wrote. The piece, written four years ago, continues to lead the site, unaware that control has been taken away.
