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The archives of the MTV News website has been completely wiped out, taking decades worth of cultural journalism with it.
Paramount Global shut MTV News down as a media organization back in May 2023, and now the MTV News website and all of its contents have been fully pulled in its entirety.
The website was home to decades of music journalism, with articles and interviews dating back to when the site launched in the ’90s. The website was famous for its weekly “Mixtape Monday” column, which covered hip-hop and ran through the 2000s and 2010s. It was the home for some of the biggest news stories of the music world, including the death of Kurt Cobain in 1994.
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Former MTV News staffers took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to vent about the website shutdown and the deletion 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.”
Some have speculated that the MTV News articles may be available on the internet archive service the Wayback Machine. But Brian Hiatt, Longtime Rolling Stone senior writer, noted that the older articles are not available (the site began archiving the internet in 1996).
