Historians and researchers may one day need to refer to articles put up on the Exaro website. It covered a wide range of issues from detailed investigations into allegations of child sex abuse, what Rupert Murdoch really thought about News International’s involvement in hacking and paying sources, the tax avoiders in Whitehall, the demise of the Audit Commission, business stories involving arms deals and ” dieselgate”.
Exaro has now taken down the website but fortunately a large proportion of the original articles can be seen here at this link here
https://web.archive.org/web/20161015090809/http://www.exaronews.com/ … …
However there are a number of caveats as this is not the complete picture. This link only covers stories published by Exaro up until the sacking of its editor in chief, Mark Watts, by Exaro and New Sparta management.
After this happened Mark Conrad and I, who took over running the site, commissioned and published a number of new articles including one by Nick Kochan on the discovery of WMD in Iraq long after the row over the issue had been concluded.None of these are on this archive but fortunately we have captured them and they will be put up at a later date.
When Exaro folded nearly a month later mysteriously these articles disappeared.
The description of the staff who worked for Exaro was changed back to an earlier period.Some the profiles with the exception of Mark Watts were removed as was the detail of who was running the site in the last month. So the section in this archive is not accurate.
There is one other issue in this archive. It contains a number of stories about a survivor called “Darren”. Mark Conrad and I no longer stand by the accuracy of these articles.
Prior to the closure of Exaro Mark and I were going to conduct a review of all Exaro’s child sex abuse coverage but stopped when the website closed. This does not mean we felt that articles were wrong or that we don’t stand by them despite hostile national press coverage.
But the editorial handling of the articles on Darren – which was a matter of internal dispute- made us uneasy. We felt that they did not reach proper and thorough journalistic standards that we would expect from such an investigative site. So they should be treated with caution.
As for the future the dedicated staff of Exaro will be looking at alternatives so the investigative journalism we strive to produce will be resurrected in the future.