Anatomy of Unpublishing: Negotiation of Un(Facts) in Newsroom Practice

U.S. newsrooms are increasingly asked to reconsider archived stories that remain searchable and harmful long after publication. This paper examines “unpublishing” as an emerging set of post-publication editorial judgments: updating, anonymizing, de-indexing, or, rarely, removing factual content, in response to requests from story subjects. Drawing on a qualitative thematic analysis of 122 public-facing documents (editorials, policy/FAQ pages, and submission forms) from 58 U.S. news organizations, plus eight semi-structured interviews with editors and journalists at those outlets, the study asks how newsrooms articulate and justify unpublishing and what rationales recur. Findings show that unpublishing is best understood as an institutionalized review system rather than a single act. About half of outlets publicly stage the practice through redemption-oriented editorials (e.g., Clean Slate/Fresh Start), while others bury policies as service channels. Across policies, organizations stabilize ambiguity by offering a menu of remedies and by proceduralizing decisions through eligibility criteria, documentation demands, timelines, and committee deliberation. The dominant ethical rationale is digital permanence paired with fairness and proportionality while the chief counter-frame is archival integrity and fears of erasing history. Conceptually, unpublishing functions as an epistemic intervention that reopens once-stabilized facts, revealing how journalistic authority depends on continued circulation and contestable social consequences.