Spike a Story

To spike a story is to decide, usually at the editor or proprietor level, that a piece of journalism will not run. The term dates to the pre-digital era, when discarded copy was literally impaled on a metal spike on the sub-editor's desk. Today the practice is digital, but the verb survives across English-language newsrooms.

Stories are spiked for a range of legitimate reasons: the reporting does not stand up, sources retract, a libel risk emerges, the angle is overtaken by events, or space and resourcing shift. Editors routinely spike copy without controversy, and the decision is normally a matter of news judgment.

The term becomes politically charged when spiking appears to serve interests other than the reader's. Common allegations include:

• Proprietor interference — an owner protecting a business or political ally.
• Advertiser pressure — pulling coverage that threatens a major commercial relationship.
• Source protection deals — suppressing material to preserve future access.
• Legal chilling — abandoning a story under threat of litigation, sometimes called a SLAPP effect.

A widely discussed example is the National Enquirer's "catch and kill" arrangements reported during the 2016 U.S. presidential cycle, in which American Media Inc. purchased stories about Donald Trump and then declined to publish them; the practice featured in the 2018 non-prosecution agreement between AMI and federal prosecutors. Investigative reporting by Ronan Farrow at The New Yorker in 2017–2019 also described stories on Harvey Weinstein being spiked or stalled at NBC News, an account NBC disputed.

For researchers and MUN delegates analysing media freedom, spiking sits alongside self-censorship, prior restraint, and editorial capture as a mechanism by which information reaches — or fails to reach — the public sphere. It is rarely visible from the outside, which is why whistleblower accounts and internal memos are central to documenting it.