Photo credit: MTV News, via Internet Archive
The Internet Archive has come to the rescue after most of the old articles on MTV News' site, dating back to 1997, suddenly disappeared.
Paramount Global made the corporate decision to remove online content from MTV News, Comedy Central, TVLand and CMT, much of which is currently stored in the Internet Archive's searchable index. Notably, content from the past 27 years, dating back to 1997, was suddenly lost.
The Internet Archive currently provides “a searchable index of 460,575 web pages previously published on mtv.com/news.” It's worth noting that the archived content is not a “full complement of what was published over the last 20 years,” and some images on archived pages are not available. However, this preservation ensures that at least MTV News articles will continue to be accessible in some form.
MTV News launched in 1987 as a segment called “This Week in Rock” hosted by Rolling Stone magazine print journalist-turned-TV music correspondent Kurt Loder and was shut down in May 2023.
“I worked at Rolling Stone, and everyone who wrote about what was then called rock music had a very negative view of MTV,” Kurt Loder told Rolling Stone. But his decision to throw himself into this new format gave him the opportunity to meet artists like Madonna, Prince, and Nirvana's Kurt Cobain. “I got to fly wherever I wanted and do all sorts of things,” Loder says. “It was a great time. I don't know if I'll ever come back, but I'll come back for something else.”
The entertainment landscape has changed dramatically over the past 27 years, along with advancements in technology, but if you're old enough to have actually watched MTV on your TV, you'll remember hit singles from 1997, like Elton John's “Candle in the Wind,” a tribute to Princess Diana, and what a loss the coverage of that time meant to pop culture.
These are worrying times, with corporate mergers rampant and traditional journalism being eclipsed by the Internet, but it's comforting to know that places like the Internet Archive still exist, preserving journalism just like your local library.