Junkee responds to disappearance of old content as the site relaunches

Junkee Media has responded to criticism alleging the youth publisher has removed older journalistic content from the Internet. The news comes a day after the relaunch of its pop culture title Junkee with a new website and brand identity.

Whilst it originally seemed that archived content could still be accessed via specific old URLs if known to the user, much of the old content appeared to be effectively lost. Former Junkee journalists took to social media to express concerns about their work disappearing following the rebrand.

Tahlia Pritchard commented on Twitter/X, "Junkee has archived their old stuff for a rebrand but the search function doesn't seem to work when you try to find your old articles even in the archive... a lot of writers out there potentially losing track of their efforts, words, time, resumes, timeline of their careers..."

Patrick Lenton responded, "ach. well there goes hours of work I did putting these articles in my portfolio. Although tbh, some of my articles from this era deserve to be lost forever," 

"I think some of my early freelance work on Junkee (stuff I was really proud of) just disappeared with the site’s rebrand... I was literally thinking the other day about how I should save the clippings somewhere," lamented Chris Button.

"Bad enough to learn several of your articles have been wiped from the internet forever because of a website’s rebrand. but more importantly, what’s going on with that logo?" said Alex Gallagher.

While Lavender Baj remarked: "lol Junkee’s editors letter about the rebrand references all of the stories that moved people that now direct to 404 pages... (doesn’t matter heaps for me because I have no intention of returning to that part of the industry, but this is devastating for everyone else)"

However, in response to inquiries from Mediaweek, Junkee editor Katie Stow assured the publisher was collaborating with its developers to make sure users could still navigate the archived site. She insisted the company had actively invested resources to maintain the old Junkee as part of its rebranding efforts.

"We’re delighted to say that the glitches we were seeing were temporary and have been resolved," Stow stated.

"All authors can freely see their author pages with their full content history on Junkee’s archive (eg. https://archive.junkee.com/author/ky-stewart). This was something that was important to us during the development of Junkee 2.0 to show respect to contributors of Junkee’s legacy."

She further explained, "We’re still thoroughly testing everything to be 100% sure that every link is working perfectly, but are confident that the bulk of actions are running smoothly on the archive site and our team will continue working until everything is resolved. Having an archive site is something that we actively prioritised and invested in to ensure that important work is preserved."

Earlier this week, MTV faced a swathe of similar accusations as decades of news content were wiped after its website, MTVNews.com, went dark. The site was shuttered and stopped publishing in 2023 amid financial woes from its parent company, Paramount Global. As of Monday, the MTVNews.com URL redirects to the main MTV.com homepage, rendering a wealth of interviews and features on musical artists from the past decades inaccessible.

Junkee has been a part of the Australian media landscape for nearly a decade. The relaunch marks the final phase of a brand evolution driven by editor-in-chief Alice Griffin, who took up the mantle in November 2022, moving from her post as editor of MTV Australia.

See also: ‘Bolder, brattier, and braver’: Junkee relaunches with new site and brand identity