Here's an interesting little mystery.
Anna Clark writes on Thursday in Columbia Journalism Review:
Last fall, Detroit’s Metro Times and Cleveland’s Scene, alt-weeklies owned by Euclid Media, each published big, ambitious stories about the billionaire businessman Dan Gilbert.
Then, earlier this year, the stories disappeared from the Web with no explanation. They went back up today, but the question stands: What’s going on here?
Gilbert is both the owner of the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers and the chairman and founder of Detroit-based Quicken Loans. He has mammoth influence in both cities, especially when it comes to urban development. Gilbert purchased some 60 major downtown buildings in Detroit over the last four years, and in Cleveland, the Cavaliers are preparing to ask taxpayers to pay for an upgrade to Quicken Loans Arena.
No wonder, then, that Gilbert comes in for scrutiny. In November 2014, Scene and Metro Times published lengthy pieces on the impact of Gilbert and his company in their respective communities. “What kind of track record does Quicken Loans have in Detroit? Does anyone really care?” asked the Metro Times story. Written by staff reporter Ryan Felton, it was in the spirit of what we’ve called for at CJR: an exploration of the mortgage company’s lending history in Detroit, a city that was among the hardest hit by foreclosures in the housing crisis.
Something happened last week, CJR reports.
The links to the articles on both sites hit dead pages. Cached versions were gone too, CJR writes.
Clark writes that she spoke to a Metro Times staff member who said the stories actually were deleted “a couple weeks ago.” She adds: "The Web scrubbing wasn’t quite complete: Felton’s 6,000-word story on “downtown’s demigod”remained visible here, in the digital archive of the print edition."
CJR asked for comment from Chris Keating, publisher of Scene and Metro Times, who responded by email:
"Yep - I temporarily took the article offline for an internal review. Happens periodically - granted some topics seem to garner more attention from other media than others. At any rate, should be back up here shortly."
She also asked Aaron Emerson, Quicken’s director of communications, about the removal of the stories and if there was a problem with reporting?
He said:
“This is a question best suited for the Metro Times. I'm sure they’d be able to discuss how they post and curate items on their website.”
She said around midday Thursday, the stories were live again.
Clark talked to Vince Grzegorek, who edits both publications in Cleveland and Detroit, and who co-authored Scene’s version of the story with Felton.
He told Clark: “Nothing has been changed except for one minor deletion.”
Clark writes: " That would be a several-hundred-word passage describing a tour of Quicken headquarters, which appeared only in the Metro Times story, and which Grzegorek called “superfluous.”
Grzegorek told Clark that Gilbert “never asked the piece be taken down.”
Of course, there may be a difference between someone asking to remove an article and asking to remove passages.
Clark writes that executives of Metro Times' parent company did not immediately address follow-up questions sent by email today about what prompted the internal review.
