Former Junkee writers angry at work being wiped
Junkee has launched a website refresh that has effectively wiped the history of the site from the internet.
Numerous writers have taken to social media to complain about links to their work now being met with 404 pages.
Although all past work is archived on the site, and articles can be accessed by simply adding archive to the front of the URL (archive.junkee.com/etc), all previous links to these are now broken, and any Google results have the old links, which bring up the 404 page.
It is, for those who poured their time and effort into the publication, a frustrating situation, made all the more galling to some by the editor-in-chief’s insistence that “we’ll always honour the foundation built by the people before us.”
As someone pointed out on X, modern CMS systems can handle redirects and remapping old content.
Mumbrella reached out to Junkee, and thankfully, this may be temporary.
“As everything has just gone live, we’re working with our developers to make sure that everything is running as smoothly as possible for people to explore the archive site – something that we have actively invested resource into to keep alive so that historical Junkee content can be accessed by all,” a spokesperson tells us.
“The glitches we’re seeing are temporary, but we’ll keep replying in the comments so everyone is across the updates.”
Hopefully, the archive of eleven years’ worth of work will soon be restored.
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Nathan Jolly is the Deputy Editor of Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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The article should be available on the Internet Archive if they really want them. Publishers have the right to delete content if it’s not helpful from an SEO perspective. They own the content.
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So they annoy their writers and tank their SEO. Not going well really is it.
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Time Out did the same years ago and never really recovered its search rankings.
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