Hi. I looked into it a bit but generally support is way better at this than I am. I'm saying that because other writers may read this exchange. So always best to start by contacting support.

This sounds like a huge bummer because I agree there was a world where this story would have crossed $1k in earnings. But I don't think you should be chewing antacids.

Here's what I found when I went looking (mostly this is a double check of support and I think they actually looked deeper).

We boosted this on the 20th. I don't want to say what time because I'm looking at two different systems and I'm not sure if they are showing times in the same timezone. (See, support is better, I'm an amateur).

Then, and this is the part that I think support told you and you are disagreeing with, I'm seeing that you unpaywalled the story on the 21st, maybe around 3:47am ET. We keep a log of every change to the paywall status and that's what I'm seeing. It lists your account as the one doing it.

I also see in the log that you paywalled the story on the 25th, I think after talking to support. This is also different than what you are reporting to me. Is there any chance you are misremembering? I double checked our tools anyway.

We do have an admin tool to paywall and unpaywall stories, but it shows our user account in the log. I tested that just now by removing the story from the paywall and adding it back. The log correctly shows my account.

I'm going to take your report of not doing this yourself seriously by looking for anyone else who is experiencing this as a bug and looking for some flaw in our UI that would have caused you to do this accidentally. None of the options seem particularly likely. But surprises happen. In the mean time--this really looks like a misunderstanding on your end. If that jogs anything and you could fill me in then that would be helpful.

I do think then that this wasn't allegedly not paywalled. It literally wasn't and the only question is how that change happened.

As for making up the payment... we didn't make any money either or I would feel pretty strongly that we should share it.

As is, we didn't earn any money on this story that we aren't sharing with you and we were most likely the ones driving the vast majority of the traffic. That second point is important to me at least. So I'm not going to add to the payment although I agree with you that this is unfortunate.

However, if you find any other information, please let me know. In the mean time I will continue to look for a reason why I am wrong and should reverse myself.

Also, can you check your Biden piece? It also is not behind the paywall and the logs show that you removed the paywall later in the day on the 21st.