RIP MTVNews.com

[Batman]

Not sure if this is more suited for the journalism or news board. Probably a good discussion to be had on both fronts.
A year after it shut down MTV News, Paramount has pulled the plug on its website MTVnews.com — and in doing so, erased more than 20 years of archived content including news stories and reviews. Two decades of history, erased without warning and in the blink of an eye. For journalists, it's months or years of work that effectively no longer exists.

I've always felt this is why, if the human race is still around in a thousand years, people might look back on this the way they do at the Dark Ages in terms of history and knowledge. Things will just disappear, never to be seen again.

https://variety.com/2024/digital/news/mtv-news-website-archives-pulled-offline-1236047163/

 

[Inky_Wretch]

Hopefully, Archive.org has all that safely stored away. (And that their servers never go kaput.)

When my old paper was sold, the new company nuked all the online archives. Without the Wayback Machine, I'd have not been able to find most of the things I'd written there.

 

[playthrough]

The Wayback Machine has been of little help to me in finding old work, and my emotions around that over the years have ranged from annoyed to wanting to pass out. Feel horrible for all those journalists.

 

[YMCA B-Baller]

“And that’s the latest on Guns ‘n Roses drummer. Now stay tuned for ‘Remote Control’, but first, a word from Randee of the Redwoods. This was MTV News.”

 

[garrow]

Fondly recall Tabitha Soren and Serena Altschul.

 

[HanSenSE]

Fondly recall Tabitha Soren and Serena Altschul.

And Alison Stewart.

 

[maumann]

The Wayback Machine has been of little help to me in finding old work, and my emotions around that over the years have ranged from annoyed to wanting to pass out. Feel horrible for all those journalists.

Duane Cross told me the techies at CNN wiped the memory banks of everything NASCAR.com a few years ago. So my 15 years at Turner disapeared in the blink of a reboot. There are some scraps out there, mainly my history column links to Wikipedia and the barest of pieces transfered over when NASCAR took over the website.

That was a lot of decently paid sweat equity. At the same time, once it left my fingertips and got posted, it was always Turner's to do with as they liked. I had the epiphany quite a while ago that no matter what job I did, someone had done it before me and someone was going to do it after I left. But somebody out there may have a cassette tape of my voice or a faded column in a scrapbook. So I exist.

At least until this site crashes.

 

[HanSenSE]

But wait there's more!

 

[swingline]

Coming soon to a paid site near you.

 

[2muchcoffeeman]

But wait there's more!

And also CMT.

Decades of articles, news stories, reviews, interviews, and think pieces have been eliminated from the CMT website, as well as the website of its sister music publication, MTV. It’s not just that the company has laid off all its journalists and editors. It’s that the work of scores of writers over many years—tens of thousands of articles in total—are now gone, and at this point they are unlikely to be reconstituted among budget cuts at CMT’s parent company Paramount.

Sure, some of CMT’s written content over the years has been mellifluous puff pieces on pop country stars that is either expendable or redundant to other articles on a dozen or so other country music/entertainment websites. But this archive also included very important journalism and commentary that cannot be replaced, while CMT was one of the largest and prolific media outlets in country music since its inception in 1983.

For example, award-winning journalist Chet Flippo—who among other achievements wrote the liner notes to the album Wanted: The Outlaws and was the country reporter for Rolling Stone in the ’70s—operated a weekly column called “Nashville Skyline.” All of those columns are now gone. Chet Flippo passed away in 2013, and unless someone has them saved somewhere, they will never again see the light of day.

The CMT archive also including things like CMT’s list of the “Greatest Country Albums of All Time” that has been referenced by Saving Country Music on numerous occasions. It included articles critical to the careers of numerous country performers. Eliminating the articles also results in many thousands of dead links across the internet in country music stories.

For a while, CMT also operated a subdomain called CMT Edge that covered a lot of independent country and Americana artists before it was eliminated in the many rounds of budget cuts at the outlet over the years. Paramount shuttered MTV News in 2023 to the disappointment of many, and CMT’s editorial content has been spotty at best over the last few years. But eliminating all the articles in the past seems especially punitive shortsighted.

Along with being a useful resource to the public, the industry, and other journalists, article archives are often a strong source of revenue for many outlets. Even if the revenue is marginal—especially after Google tweaked its search parameters to emphasize newer articles as opposed to older ones—the ad revenue generated from these articles could easily cover the cost to host them on a server.

But as we have seen in music journalism recently including with Pitchfork, investment capital comes in and purchases outlets, and then guts staff or outright shuts them down believing there is more money to be made in downsizing or eliminating the properties.

The eradication of the CMT archive also calls into question the viability of CMT moving forward. CMT has already moved their annual awards show to CBS since so few young people now have access to the actual cable channel due to cord cutting. The outlet still hosts occasional “Crossroads” episodes and other original programming, but mostly relies on reruns, while most consumers watch music videos on YouTube.​

CMT & MTV’s Eradication of Editorial Content is a Catastrophe -...

 

[Baron Scicluna]

When asked to choose or lose, Paramount chose to lose.

 

[Shropshire Slasher]

Seems ironic that CBS is reverting back to rural progamming after its early-70s purge, but only the olds and the old-adjacents will get it.

 

[Brooklyn Bridge]

What purpose does wiping the old articles do? It can’t save money, or if it does, it’s minuscule. In my job, we have to save every article/update that is posted. It’s for a public entity, so a bit different, but I don’t see it.

 

[Inky_Wretch]

What purpose does wiping the old articles do? It can’t save money, or if it does, it’s minuscule. In my job, we have to save every article/update that is posted. It’s for a public entity, so a bit different, but I don’t see it.

When my old newspaper did it, I heard through the grapevine it was due to the problem of moving things from one corporate server to another. Utter BS, but I guess they didn't want the IT guy to have to spend a few hours on it.

 

[Roscablo]

I have had stories published online in full as early as 1999. When I was in college, at the end of that year, we traveled to cover a bowl game over the holiday break and did the whole thing online. Four or five stories a day. Always felt we were ahead of the times! I worked for an online only prep sports site in 2000 that definitely was ahead of its time and couldn't stay above water for more than a year. I wrote for a spell for a website that was owned by the New York Times and wasn't small. I did marketing and online content for a large national nonprofit. But I can hardly find anything I had published prior to 2015. If I really dig I can find some stuff, but it is amazing that it mostly is just gone. Some of it is multiple sales of companies and websites and so on (happened at two of the places I've worked). But still.

It is amazing that seems standard, and is still a practice today. Even the bad and ugly, just vanished. Wouldn't all these places want an archive of all the content they have done over the years? Even if moved to different sites or services or whatever? So much information gone.

I had a break in journalism and writing for a good amount of time and got back into it a few years ago. Not thinking I needed to save copies of online content all those years ago, I had nothing in terms of writing samples. One editor who eventually gave me a job was sympathetic to that and let me do practice stories, even paid me for them, to prove I could do the work. I now have a few pieces to a portfolio that won't matter if the last sites I've worked for self destruct.

It is all a very interesting element in the online world.

 

[BYH 2: Electric Boogaloo]

When asked to choose or lose, Paramount chose to lose.

Take your like, etc etc.

 

[BYH 2: Electric Boogaloo]

I wrote for a ton of sites at the start of the dot-com boom, during that magical nine-month period where it seemed like we'd found a new and endless frontier (I guess we did, it just didn't turn out to be as beneficial as we hoped). Thus, I've lost thousands of stories to the ether. Some sites went kaput. Some sites were bought out and their old archives and URLs were zapped. Some sites remain online but have (and always had) awful archives. The place I wrote the most for just zapped the archives because they felt like it.

The good thing, I guess, is that everything I've written since 2003 is on my laptop right now...and was on the laptop before that...and was on the laptop before that...and is on a portable hard drive just in case. So at least I have my own archive, and it's come in handy many times on projects big and small. I was able to write a pretty good feature/obituary on a player I covered based largely on the stories I'd written about him and his team. I never would have found those stories online. My current work is pretty evenly split between stories I write and email to editors and stories I write and post in an platform operated by the company for whom I'm writing. But regardless, I write them all in Word, so I'll always have my archive.

 

[BYH 2: Electric Boogaloo]

Also, I might argue that newspapers/online sites that remain active but still gut their online archive is worse than MTVNews.com, et al, going kaput. The latter is still terrible! But if you're still a functioning publication, there's no excuse for anything to be vaporized. Yet MLB.com is filled with 404 codes for stories that were written only a few years ago. Locally, Gannett has completely destroyed the Bergen Record archive (shocking, I know). The NY Daily News archive has been gutted during its "evolution" into a piecemeal operation. The NY Post is pretty good and Newsday is OK, but the latter is more hit-and-miss. I don't know about the Star-Ledger, but I assume the SEO lunatics that run that place vaporize everything that's more than 15 minutes old.

 

[I Should Coco]

I think with newspapers, a lot of it happens when they change systems and would require time, money and/or giving a s#@$ to put the archives from the old system onto the new one.