This paper has stopped publishing
Heavy Metal Today printed eleven editions between 3 and 12 August 2026. Nine of the stories it published were false. All nine have been retracted, and the archive stays open.
It was a daily newspaper about metal, assembled by machine from 93 official sources across 16 countries. It printed twenty-five stories in ten days.
Nine of them were false. That is thirty-six per cent of everything this paper ever published, and all nine went out on 12 August 2026.
Each said a band had been added to Summer Breeze. Each was drawn from a photograph gallery of a performance that had already finished. The machine treated the moment it first saw a page as the moment the news happened, so it read a record of a completed set as an announcement of a future one, and printed it as news. Nine times, in under eight hours.
All nine are retracted. Every retraction names the story, its source and exactly what went wrong, and stands permanently on the corrections log. Nothing has been deleted. The nine remain at the addresses they were published at, marked as retracted, because a false story that quietly disappears does more damage than one that stays with its correction attached to it.
The sources were not at fault. Summer Breeze published accurate galleries of its own festival. This paper misread them.
Nor was the defect confined to those nine. Of the 2,095 facts this paper recorded, 2,079 carried no time of their own — only the moment the machine first noticed them. The nine stories are simply where that reached print.
Publishing is suspended from today. The paper is being rebuilt rather than repaired, around the thing it got wrong: a claim has to carry its own time, and that time is never the moment a machine happened to look.
The archive stays open. Every edition, every story and every correction remains readable at the address it always had, and will not be moved.