MTV News Has Vanished From the Web

Last May, Paramount shut down MTV News, the long-running news division that started back in the early ’80s. (Tim Sommers worked there between 1983 and 1990 and shared some behind-the-scenes memories of its early days.) The MTV News website, however, was still up and running… until this week, that is, when Paramount shut it down and took its archives offline:

More than two decades’ worth of content published on MTVNews.com is no longer available after MTV appears to have fully pulled down the site and its related content. Content on its sister site, CMT.com, seems to have met a similiar fate.

[…]

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.

I should know better by now, but honestly, I’m still baffled when companies take down online content in this manner. (See also Paramount’s decision to delete 25 years’ worth of clips from Comedy Central’s website, including classic Daily Show and Colbert Report clips.) That’s doubly so for a site like MTV News, which contained so much content spanning so many years.

Obviously, MTV stopped caring about music a long time ago. The “Music Television” branding was dropped back in 2010 and in the years that followed, they embraced all manner of programming (reality TV, scripted series, sketch comedy, movies) except for music programming. (Some of that was undoubtedly due to YouTube, which made MTV increasingly unnecessary as a channel for videos.) It was therefore only a matter of time until the website followed MTV News into oblivion.

That said, why wipe out the website? What benefits do Paramount and/or MTV reap from such a decision? Were execs and investors actively calling for the site’s erasure? If so, that feels akin to the hollow, culture-killing reasoning employed by Hollywood execs who slash and burn their own films and streaming libraries. (In both cases, countless individuals are forced to watch their hard work disappear into the ether without any acknowledgement of how disheartening and disappointing that must be for them.)

Whenever I see a site closure like this, I ask myself the same question: how much would it cost, really, to create and host a static, stripped down version of the site à la Jeff Huang’s manifesto? Lock down the CMS, remove any cruft like comments and logins, and just serve up the news articles using plain ol’ HTML and CSS like it’s 1999.

Paramount Global, which owns MTV, earned $29.65 billion in 2023. Admittedly, they’re also $14.6 billion in debt, but do they really think that shutting down websites and online archives will make a dent in that number? Surely they could still afford to archive the site properly. Even better, Paramount could officially turn the MTV News archives over to the Internet Archive since they obviously don’t seem to care about them any more.

I know I’m yelling into the void here. Still, it’s frustrating to see companies delete their content with seemingly no thought given to its value and relevance, or any serious effort made to preserve it for posterity. Although web content is, in a sense, ephemeral, it’s still connected to the real world — to the history of popular music in MTV News’ case — and as such, it’d be nice to see some concern for its long-term availability.

Finally, as a postscript, let this be a stark reminder that if you’re writing for any outlets or publications, save and archive your work. Don’t trust the execs to do it for you. As we’ve seen with MTV News and many other online publications, they’ll make it all vanish with nary a second thought.