MTV News Website Pulled Down, Everything Is Gone

Well this sucks – nearly two decades of music history has disappeared off the Internet.

MTVNews.com has been pulled down (and redirects to the main MTV site), taking roughly 20 years of content and news items with it. MTV News was shut down in May 2023 by its parent company Paramount Global, meaning both its web presence and on-air programming met the media scythe so many of us have come across over the years.

MTV News started off in the late ’80s with Kurt Loder and The Week In Rock. MTV News expanded into political coverage in 1992 with their “Choose or Lose” segment, and had a pretty strong digital presence throughout the 2000s. MTV News suffered a major blow in 2017 when there was a pivot to video (a sentence you never, ever want to hear as an employee), which saw most of the editorial staff laid off.

“Who cares?” you might ask. Well, anyone that’s interested in anything that anyone who worked at MTV News had to say since 1996 cares. Losing massive pieces of Internet history like the MTV News and all the music on MySpace might seem like nothing, but it’s vast portions of history that we’re just deleting, never to get back. And that sucks, not only for anyone that worked on it, but for the overall preservation of music and entertainment history.

Though what else did you expect from a major corporation? As long as some fucker is making the big bucks, there’s no sympathy for this sort of thing.