MTV News Website Goes Dark, Archives Pulled Offline

[highplainsdem]

https://variety.com/2024/digital/news/mtv-news-website-archives-pulled-offline-1236047163/

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.”

-snip-

“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?”

-snip-

Paramount also removed the archive of country-music journalism from the CMT website last week. That went back decades.

MTV's news archive went back to the 1980s.

And according to the article, the older news stories aren't in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, which didn't start archiving that site till the end of 1998 and has a lot of gaps:
https://wayback-api.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/mtvnews.com

Apparently none of the journalists were notified in advance:

Link to tweet

[John1956PA]

1. Paramount Global controls CBS Entertainment, Paramount Pictures, and MTV.

The ownership structure of the conglomerate and its history of mergers, acquisitions and spinoffs is interesting.

[DJ Synikus Makisimus]

2. Knowledge Is Power, So You Can't Have Any

If journalism is "the first rough draft of history," and "winners write history," what happens when a winning corporation needs to change history? I mean let's face it, in our current capitalist society corporations ALWAYS win. Can't have those pesky first drafts laying around to allow people to challenge a changed narrative. I would expect this to be the beginning of a trend.

[Ferryboat]

3. Fine example of over reliance on tech

A terrible loss for future historians. At least with print there maybe more than one copy.
Outdated tech makes access difficult if devices or the knowledge to use such is cosigned to a dustbin.

Not sure what the answer is.