The website MTV News has gone dark and decades of popular music archives have been pulled offline as the network's parent, Paramount Global, continues to suffer financial hardships.
MTV News stopped broadcasting new content in 2023, but the site and its archives were still available. The same fate struck MTV News sister site, CMT.com as most of the archived content appears to be missing.
MTV News began in 1996 and broke new ground in digital journalism. The site chronicled the rise of rap and hip-hop in the early 2000s and the loss of the archives is a blow to music historians.
Many former staffers of MTV News were bitter about the loss.
So, https://t.co/ypQLdbaWk5 no longer exists. Eight years of my life are gone without a trace. All because it didn't fit some executives' bottom lines. Infuriating is too small a word
— Patrick Hosken (@patrickhosken) June 24, 2024
Well, a small word for a small mind. Your parent company is fighting for its existence. Paramount just failed in its effort to merge with Skydance Media, leaving the entertainment giant dangling on the edge of bankruptcy.
Obviously, Mr. Hosken is of a generation that doesn't understand what makes the music business a business.
The now-unavailable content includes decades of music journalism comprising thousands of articles and interviews with countless major artists, dating back to the site’s launch in 1996. Perhaps the most significant loss is MTV News’ vast hip-hop-related archives, particularly its weekly “Mixtape Monday” column, which ran for nearly a decade in the 2000s and 2010s and featured interviews, reviews and more with many artists, producers and others early in their careers.
This is disgraceful. They've completely wiped the MTV News archive. Decades of pop culture history research material gone, and why? https://t.co/xJQRXrNERS
— Brian Hiatt (@hiattb) June 24, 2024
Hiatt is a senior writer for Rolling Stone. That might explain why he can't figure out why cutting the cost of maintaining archives might be attractive to the green eye-shade people in the executive offices.
In May 2023, Paramount Global shut down MTV News — which had already been severely downsized by layoffs in recent years — coming amid a 25% reduction in workforce across the Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios and Paramount Media Networks groups in the U.S. The group is headed by president-CEO Chris McCarthy, who in late April was named one of the three co-CEOs running Paramount Global’s “Office of the CEO.”
For some, it's more evidence of a "digital dark age" that has descended on some online industries.
Archives should never disappear. Full-stop. This is what they mean when they say we're in a digital dark age. There will be no evidence of the incredible cultural journalism that so many people contributed to. If this happens with BuzzFeed News...I STG https://t.co/sM5xwJAMxY
— AB (@AlannaBennett) June 24, 2024
She’s right. The closing of MTV News is another piece of our encroaching digital dark age. As Apple and Meta’s walled gardens expand, Twitter prices out data researchers (not to mention Elon Musk’s litigiousness), and Google relies on plagiarism engines to satisfy its bots’ needs, the internet is slowly outgrowing its usefulness. Future generations will find the last 15 years challenging to understand. Thankfully, nothing of note occurred.
What we're seeing is the usual shaking out of winners and losers. Those who adapt will survive. Those who don't will fall. MTV News failed to make money for its parent company and suffered the same fate that other failed enterprises suffered.
It ain't rocket science, kids.
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