According to a published report from Variety, over 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. Its sister site, CMT.com, seems to have also gone dark and its archives removed. This follows the 2023 MTV News shutdown amid the reported financial woes of parent company, Paramount Global. As of Monday, any attempt to access previous MTV News articles on mtvnews.com or mtv.com/news resulted in visitors being redirected to the main MTV website homepage. This has been met online with furor with many culture commentators decrying this move. 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.
We previously reported on this story and David Ellefson, formerly of Megadeth, whose bass line on the song “Peace Sells…” was the MTV news theme bumper sound for decades in one form or another, commented on this story at the time.
The now-unavailable content includes decades of music journalism comprising thousands of articles and interviews with countless major artists, dating back to the site’s launch in 1996. Perhaps the most significant loss is MTV News’ vast hip-hop-related archives, particularly its weekly “Mixtape Monday” column, which ran for nearly a decade in the 2000s and 2010s and featured interviews, reviews and more with many artists, producers and others early in their careers.
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?”
Last week, Paramount Global’s CMT website similarly pulled its repository of country-music journalism dating back several decades.
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.