Late last month, Paramount Global suddenly disabled its MTV News website, wiping out more than two decades of music and entertainment journalism, and just over a week later, the Internet Archive responded by creating a searchable collection of the old MTV News site via the Wayback Machine.
The collection is made up of more than 460,575 snapshots of web pages that the Internet Archive has collected over the years. As Variety, which first reported on the collection, points out, the archive appears to date back to 1997. However, it doesn't include everything MTV News has published over the years. Images of many of the archived pages are also no longer available, although the original text of these articles remains intact.
The new MTV News collection came about after the site was shut down and the Internet Archive reached out to Michael Alex, who founded and led MTV News' digital group from 1994 to 2007. Alex called the collection “incomplete” but “very impressive,” adding that it's “like a treasure trove when you find what you're looking for.”
Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, told Rolling Stone in an email: “The Internet Archive has archived Mtv.com/news for decades, and its contents are stored in the Wayback Machine. We've built a full-text search engine to help you find MTV News pages. We apologize that it may not be complete; we're more likely to have a complete snapshot when the publisher announces it's going offline. As a library, it's our job to preserve cultural heritage. We hope this helps.”
A source close to Paramount production told Rolling Stone that nothing from MTV News has been removed and that the company is “evaluating ways to more efficiently deliver this important content.”
The nonprofit Internet Archive collects and makes available all kinds of material, both digital and physical, but is best known for its Wayback Machine, which has been crawling and recording the internet since the mid-'90s. Over the years, it has created specific collections that make it easier for users and researchers to dig into the backlog of specific sites, like its new collection for MTV News (it has also created collections for former digital media giants like Gawker and Vice).
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Last year, Paramount Global shut down its long-running MTV News division as part of major staff reductions. The site has been dormant since then, but was accessible until the decision to disable it last week. In addition to removing MTV News, Paramount Global also appears to have removed thousands of articles from the CMT website and tons of videos from the Comedy Central site.
Commenting on the decision, a Paramount Global spokesperson said: “As part of a broader change to our website across Paramount, we have introduced a more streamlined version of the site, which will result in all MTV News content being archived.”
The Internet Archive is best known for such preservation projects (as well as the revival of the DatPiff mixtape archive), but they've also landed the nonprofit in legal trouble: The archive is currently facing two copyright infringement lawsuits, one from a book publisher and one from music rights holders.
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Last year, the publishers won a lawsuit brought by the Archive over its “National Emergency Library,” an effort the Archive launched to make its trove of scanned books more readily available while libraries and schools were closed during the COVID-19 pandemic. That suit was followed by another led by two major record companies, Universal Music Group and Sony Music, over the Archive's “Great 78 Project,” an effort to digitize and make available obsolete 78 RPM records. The Archive denies copyright infringement in both cases. The publishers' cases are currently being heard on appeal.
This story was updated at 6:53pm ET with comment from the Internet Archive, a Paramount Global spokesperson and a source close to the production.