MTV News Website Goes Offline, Archives Wiped

MTV News is no more.

via Variety:

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.

In 2023, MTV News was shuttered amid the financial woes of parent company Paramount Global. As of Monday, trying to access MTV News articles on mtvnews.com or mtv.com/news resulted in visitors being redirected to the main MTV website.

Former MTV News staffers posted on social media about the website shutdown and the scrubbing of the archives. “So, mtvnews.com no longer exists. Eight years of my life are gone without a trace,” Patrick Hosken, former music editor for MTV News, wrote on X. “All because it didn’t fit some executives’ bottom lines. Infuriating is too small a word.”

“sickening (derogatory) to see the entire @mtvnews archive wiped from the internet,” Crystal Bell, culture editor at Mashable and one-time entertainment director of MTV News, posted on X. “decades of music history gone…including some very early k-pop stories.”

“This is disgraceful. They’ve completely wiped the MTV News archive,” longtime Rolling Stone senior writer Brian Hiatt commented. “Decades of pop culture history research material gone, and why?”

Reps for MTV did not respond to requests for comment Monday.

Some observers noted that MTV News articles may be available through internet archiving services like the Wayback Machine, but according to Hiatt older MTV News articles do not show up via Wayback Machine.

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.”

MTV News began in the late ’80s with “The Week in Rock,” a show hosted by Kurt Loder, who was the first MTV News correspondent.

All that history — just gone.

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