MTV News Kills Music Journalism
RIP MTV News
Hi, I'm Kurt Loder with an MTV News brief… When this man came on your TV screen in the ‘90s, you knew it was serious. For nearly 30 years, MTV News was the definitive news source for our generation. Kurt Loder was Walter Cronkite and he was joined by a cast of smart, diverse journalists— who reported news without trying to sensationalize it.
This was how many of us found out about breaking news like the passing of Kurt Cobain, Tupac Shakur, Aaliyah and The Notorious B.I.G., elections, wars and events like Columbine that changed our lives.
This week, MTV News pulled all of its archives dating back to 1996.
As Variety reported,
In 2023, MTV News was shuttered amid the financial woes of parent company Paramount Global. As of Monday, trying to access MTV News articles on mtvnews.com or mtv.com/news resulted in visitors being redirected to the main MTV website.
It’s unclear why MTV would pull down the last remaining symbol of its glorious past. There’s some speculation that it could be to outwit AI scraping for content but let’s be honest, these decisions always fall on dollars. This is the channel that allowed every other media outlet to co-opt its model while it slowly devolved into a never-ending sludge of Ridiculousness.
MTV News wasn’t just a nostalgic relic, it’s necessary to journalism today.
As a cub reporter, I contributed to MTV News and its hip-hop vertical RapFix regularly. In fact, some of my big early interviews were courtesy of MTV Hive, the channel that let me pitch interviews with the likes of Travis Scott and Chance The Rapper, then unknowns. Throughout my interview process for my book Fashion Killa, the MTV News archives were invaluable. There’s so little original media available to access online and I know journalists and fans who would have gladly paid to use this trove of interviews and news.
Imagine MTV News actually being able to cover today’s current events? From Kendrick Lamar vs. Drake to the war in Israel and the 2024 election. They would have been there— and probably been far more fair and balanced than what cable news has become.
What’s saddest, is that we journalists were never even warned that the archives were going to be deleted. If we had known about this, we could have backed up old articles, taken screenshots and updated our portfolios.
We learned that history, culture and our careers were erased after it was too late.
RIP MTV News. Shout outs to Kurt Loder, Tabitha Soren, Sway, Suchin Pak, Gideon Yago, Serena Altschul, Chris Connelly, John Norris etc.
What’s your favorite memory from MTV News? Sound off in the comments.