Within hours of Duncan Garner telling listeners ‘It looks like the end of us’, the station’s website, social media and archives had been scrubbed from the internet.

Right now across Auckland you can still see ads for Leo Molloy’s doomed mayoral campaign and electorate offices adorned with a smiling Jacinda Ardern. It’s not out of the ordinary to see echoes of the past splashed across the city’s billboards and buses – but I’d be surprised if any remnants of Today FM survive this week’s messy closure. 

The plug was pulled on Mediaworks’ one-year-old talk station at about 9.30am yesterday morning. It happened while two of the network’s highest profile hosts – Tova O’Brien and Duncan Garner – were live on air, dishing the dirt to listeners on what was about to happen to them. What followed has to be one of the quickest and most brutal erasures in our media history. Even Today FM’s predecessor Magic Talk was slowly decommissioned over a period of time.

By about 5pm its Facebook page had been deleted and the Twitter account was locked (it’s now also been deleted). Shortly after, the Today FM website, home to a year’s worth of interviews, columns, features, investigations and news reports, was also gone. If you visit the URL, a banner reads: “Unfortunately the Mediaworks board has made the difficult decision to take Today FM off-air. This is a hard day for this talent team who put everything into building a new talk platform in Aotearoa”.

This swiftness was part of Mediaworks’ plan. We reported late last night on a leaked document from the organisation that put in plain English just how quickly its board hoped to erase Today FM from existence. Consultation started straight after that 9.30am meeting yesterday and was all wrapped up by 3pm. The station’s fate was confirmed just two hours later at 5pm – though the station had already been off-air for most of the day.

It felt like a formality rather than any attempt to hear out employees. “All feedback will be reviewed by the Board and Wendy Palmer CEO, prior to the final decision being made,” the document claimed. “However, with this being a Board-level proposal, we need to adhere to a rigid feedback timeframe.”

From a corporate standpoint, it makes sense – make people forget, as quickly as possible, that Today FM ever existed and point them instead in the direction of whatever comes next. Mediaworks will have been hoping Today FM didn’t become the new Campbell Live, a show briefly saved from the scrapheap after a loud and angry audience revolt.

But what’s most depressing about the instant erasure of Today FM is all the work seemingly lost to the digital void. Twitter users quickly pointed out that one of Tova O’Brien’s final editorials, written as the station was clearly already at risk of collapse, was one defending trans people against the onslaught of hate being generated by the recent rally in Auckland. Clicking on the link to that piece, like with all Today FM content, takes you to the same farewell message.

In her paywalled NBR column today, former First Light host Rachel Smalley expressed similar upset. “The website was gone, and with it a year’s worth of my work, including 12 months of investigating Pharmac and holding the drug agency to account. None of my social media links worked any more. Links to stories posted on LinkedIn and Twitter were gone. The last year of my journalism career has been wiped.”

Beyond that, Today FM had a peculiar knack of locking in exclusive interviews with newsmakers from around the world (Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy probably being the most high profile example). It’s all gone as well.

For now, the one remaining reminder of Today FM’s legacy is the station’s Instagram page, which is home to some of the station’s trademark bizarre imagery. For the last 12 months, someone at the station has been producing the most unusual news-adjacent art in New Zealand media. Much of it has since been lost in the ashes of the Today FM website. But for now, at least, some of the inexplicable masterpieces live on via Instagram – the last remaining evidence that Today FM ever existed.

Follow Duncan Greive’s NZ media podcast The Fold on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite podcast app.