Courtesy of MTV
Michael Alex joined MTV News in 1989 and produced hundreds of segments for “The Week in Rock,” the Peabody Award-winning “Choose or Lose” series, documentaries and more than 1,000 daily television news stories. He founded and led MTV News' digital organization from 1994 to 2007. Variety welcomes responsible commentary. If you're interested, please contact us at music@variety.com.
MTV News reports that a few days ago, 25 years of entertainment history vanished from the internet when parent company Paramount deleted the site's archives along with those of CMT and other media. There was no warning, no explanation, no comment. What was a valuable resource for music fans, journalists, cultural ambassadors, and millions of people who love music, just disappeared. It's unclear for how long, but what is certain is that from the beginning, the MTV News digital archive was created and designed for music fans – people who care about artists and their art. The archive was always intended to be more than just a repository of old articles, but a playground for fans who wanted to dig deep and find out more.
Here's the origin story: As a kid in the late 1970s, I found some old issues of Rolling Stone and Circus magazines for cheap in a used record store. I flicked through them and found early interviews with bands that are now at the top of their game in the world. Hearing interviews with Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath when they were just breaking out was a godsend for me as a music nerd. It wasn't old news, it was hidden treasure.
After I joined MTV News in 1989 as producer of “The Week in Rock,” it wasn't uncommon to find interns and staffers trawling through the videotape library, watching old news reports and interviews with their favorite artists. I did the same, staying late many days and rarely alone. “Hear it first” was the watchword in the building where Kurt Loder delivered the news with his trademark deadpan and authority. And when the iconic spinning globe appeared on the TV screens and Loder announced his latest news, fans knew he and we were about to share something important.
So when it came time for us to move to the Internet and become an Internet-first daily source of music news, I, as Director of MTV News Digital, directed them to create an artist index that linked to every report on every artist we'd ever covered (we did it alphabetically, since this was the day before search was available). We began in November 1996 and added to the archive with transcripts of old interviews that we pulled from our videotape library. Want to read the first interviews MTV did with Nirvana, TLC, the Rolling Stones, Jay-Z and the Pixies? We've got them.
MTV News on the web quickly took off, fueled by a loyal young audience of early adopters. As TV stations pivoted to story-focused news programming, the “first hear” soon shifted to the web, and of course we merged the two. Over the next few years, mtvnews.com became the go-to source for breaking coverage of any major artist-related event. From the rise of the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, and NSYNC, to the trial of Sean Combs in 2000 on charges related to the New York nightclub shooting, to Aaliyah's tragic death in a plane crash in 2001, to joining Blink-182 and My Chemical Romance on their Warped tour, to accompanying 50 Cent on his African tour, to recruiting artists to support get-out-the-vote campaigns during election years, we were the place to go for both speed and depth.
Being a team of music nerds ourselves, we knew the Archive would be popular, and within a year, people were reading old news articles as much as they were reading the news of the day. In the first few months, we did about three small articles about the Backstreet Boys, and our usage reports showed that these relatively unknown musicians were just as popular as the channel's biggest artists. By the time Google opened up and crawled the Archive, we were in the music history business as much as the music news business.
MTV News has always covered a much wider range of artists than the channel's other shows, but even more so on MTV News Digital. Among the many concerns we heard from people in the days since the archives were deleted was the long-running hip-hop column Mixtape Monday. This weekly series of long-running, in-depth reports featured many unknown hip-hop artists who went on to become stars and superstars, capturing the evolution of artists and the genre in a way that's never been documented anywhere else. Last week, the column disappeared. For how long? Like it or not, MTV was a unique cultural force, and MTV News reached far beyond the music world, into Hollywood, presidential campaigns, war zones and disaster zones, the United Nations and more. Where are those articles now?
I also haven't forgotten the hundreds of journalists who make MTV News what it is, whose careers were cut short by this news, losing countless stories that they spent countless hours reporting and writing. Of course, they could have saved the stories in PDF or some other way, and probably would have done so if they had been told in advance that their archives would disappear. But the Internet has made that unnecessary. As a former editor-in-chief of this team commented last week, “We're conditioned to believe that the Internet is forever, but this proves that it's not.”
To be fair, running an online archive as large as MTV News, especially one containing thousands of hours of video, can be difficult and expensive to maintain due to site redesigns and other technical issues. This isn't the first online archive to disappear, and it won't be the last.
But if there's one thing history has taught us, it's that archives are valuable. For decades, recording studios threw out priceless master tapes from everyone from the Rolling Stones to James Brown. Then, when those tapes started appearing as bootlegs, artists and labels would pay thousands of dollars to get them back. The archives of MTV News and countless other news and entertainment organizations have a price: they're living records of entertainment history as they are. And while they probably still exist deep within Paramount, it's not hard to imagine them being deleted forever in a site-wide update.
What will happen to this archive? I think it will be sold, because it's too valuable to let it not exist. But what will the new owner do with it? Perhaps they'll charge an access fee, as The New York Times and other established media outlets do. But even if there is a fee, at least the history is available.
History needs custodians, not owners. Whoever legally owns the archive may own the creative work of thousands of writers, editors, producers, and others, but they do not legally own the history. This archive — the archive of MTV news as you first heard it — needs to be made available to the public.
(Full disclosure: Variety's executive music editor, Jem Aswad, worked at MTV News from 2004 to 2010.)