MTV News Website Goes Dark, Archives Pulled Offline (variety.com) 67
MTVNews.com has been shut down, with more than two decades' worth of content no longer available. "Content on its sister site, CMT.com, seems to have met a similar fate," adds Variety. From the report: 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.
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. "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?"
The report notes that some MTV News articles may be available via internet archiving services like the Wayback Machine. However, older articles aren't available.
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. "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?"
The report notes that some MTV News articles may be available via internet archiving services like the Wayback Machine. However, older articles aren't available.
I didn't know (Score:1)
I didn't even know MTV had a news site.
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You probably think MTV still shows music videos
Follow the money and jobs (Score:1)
Skeptical of a bunch of an industry specific group of writers lamenting the loss of a
- former employer
- possible future employer
- jobs for people in the same writing industry who will now be competing with the writers for jobs
Agree on preserving the articles for future generations. Though I remember hearing that in the 1970s local radio DJs would 'interview' bands on tour by asking a question and then playing a cut from a vinyl record with a prerecorded answer. Source anyone?
Reading music interviews one w
Cliche AI data training set (Score:2)
Given that the music industry has entirely been about packaging, look, 'manufactured attitudes' since at least the 1970s, there is a treasure trove of cliches and other bad choices in the MTV news articles to be used to train AI.
Favorite cliche to hate by the post 40 former superstar female singers: "match my energy!"
Little Fluffy Clouds (Score:2)
Re: I didn't know (Score:2)
To be fair that's when I stopped watching them. They became irrelevant 25+ years ago what 20 year old news article is worth saving
Fat junkie Jersy slut shows pussy while getting out of Brittany's shifty ass old used mec?
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However when I read this:
Maybe it IS a good thing to bury this and forget the mistakes of the past.
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Yes, this is what I think. Last remember seeing MTV was in the early 90s, when that was what they did. Usually playing on a mute TV above the counter in a bar.
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Yeah - it did in 1986, which is about the last time I watched it.
Wow (Score:3)
Good on Viacom for shaving $10 off that yearly electricity bill!
Always enjoyed the interviews of MTV Drenthe (Score:3)
showing that any celebrity was willing to talk to someone with a MTV logo on their mic.
Overdramatic (Score:1)
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Music industry people are incredibly full of themselves even when they're basically nobody.
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Or even, maybe, keep a backup of his "life's work"? You know, if it was important as all that and all?
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Come on, you know they'll sue him if he would put his backups online. He's bitching because now he cannot show what a great "journalist" he was.
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Omg, no people were deleted.
That guy didn't lose 8 years of his life. It didn't vanish.
I've written for-pay tech articles that got published but are no longer available because tech moved on and the articles were no longer relevant. I got paid. I did not vanish. I did not waste my time. I still exist. I still have copies in a zip file somewhere but like everyone else I don't care because so what?
If this stuff was so important and it costs $10 to maintain then why did no one grab a copy? I'll bet the
Re:Deletionists killed the website star (Score:5, Insightful)
The individual articles were not important by themselves; it's the corpus of few thousand articles across two decades that is (was) of historical value. Of course nobody cared. First because it's not now that the information is important, second (I assume) they did not send a warning to archivists, and nobody expected it to disappear (like nobody expected MySpace to delete 50 million songs by mistake on a server migration). Serious news groups even monetize the access to their historical databases. It's not supposed to cost money to keep a few thousand html pages for infrequent consultation.
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If it was important one of the tens of thousands of wealthy people in the music industry would have paid an IT guy $500 to keep copies of it.
Note the only 2 people quoted in the summary are music article editors. Their lives are boo-hoo over, pikachu shock face! Either of them could have easily afforded to have a backup. If I thought the content on some website represented the only value 8 years of my life has then i'd make damned sure I had a copy.
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There are community efforts to archive websites in case stuff like this happens, but they are hampered by things like US copyright laws and the sites themselves trying to block scrapers. Some information is simply not available publicly either, e.g. you couldn't really archive Slashdot because there is simply no public view of the site that preserves all the comments and all the relationships between them.
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That guy didn't lose 8 years of his life. It didn't vanish.
Permanently invisible and vanish are about as close to synonymous as one can get. The journalist can't re-publish his work. It has been removed from the public discourse. I think that's the dictionary definition of "vanish."
and the articles were no longer relevant
All written works are eternally "relevant." They are part of the public domain and belong to the people. It is not your decision to make whether something is "relevant" or not.
Re: Deletionists killed the website star (Score:1)
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There is an incumbent burden on society to maintain written works in general. It is called the public domain.
As a society we grant written works sufficient importance to vest copyright protection in them at the moment of their creation. This protection is important enough that it appears in our nation's founding document alongside patent.
This protection also establishes a record of our nation's work in the form of the public domain. The destruction of a written work is the very antithesis of responsible aca
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My brother in christ are you ever an asshole.
The Death of History (Score:2)
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Dude we retain more recording of history than any other time thus far.
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And not much of value (Score:1)
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Case in point lol: "the most significant loss is MTV News' vast hip-hop-related archives"
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How will we ever remember which rapper shot which rapper? The horror!
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I'm sure the black community feels the say way about Bon Iver.
Re:And not much of value (Score:4, Insightful)
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Finally a comment I can get behind.
Don't expect a large protest over this (Score:2)
Re: Don't expect a large protest over this (Score:4, Insightful)
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I also enjoy reading weird archives at the library or old web stuff on wayback. Heck I would have enjoyed some of these articles even but these people think very highly of themselves. You can see it as he laments the loss of early k-pop history as if the articles he wrote for MTV contain information that's not likely better recorded somewhere in Korea.
Now when the file libraries of Compuserve and AOL were deleted. That was like burning down the fucking library of Alexandria!
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As a complement to the other comment; everything musically important in 19th Century German music is commented in the weekly Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung and its opinions are still read and cited today. It was published by Breitkopf & Härtel, who also published sheet music from all major composers. In this sense there is a strong parallel with MTV, which broadcasted videoclips from all famous musicians of the late 20th Century, and hosted a review website.
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Interesting information, thank you.
Maybe the Library of Congress should be required to archive things that most people interested in a subject would consider needing of archiving. Wayback is one thing but the LOC is not going to get sued. They even have a 3D scanning project so they could archive models too I bet.. They do video and websites but unfortunately when I searched for mtv found only a small number.
https://www.loc.gov/search/?in... [loc.gov]
FAQ:
https://www.loc.gov/programs/w... [loc.gov]
Is the Library legally require
Not much economic or historical value lost (Score:2)
If a piece of music was historically significant, then it will have been written about in a book. Who dated who's publicist in November of 2013 is not of historic value. Most political articles aren't worth much either
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It's incredibly important to the kind of people whining about it and they're sure that them and their pals were the center of the universe and most interesting people of the year 1991 or whatever. Really funny that none of these people felt like it was their job to archive this incredibly precious information.
Also lol @ "so much early k-pop" like I'm sure people in korea have much better record of that shit than MTV.
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Bit of a shallow take. Not everything worth saying has been put into book form within twenty years of the subject. I would say most has not, since society doesn't exactly fall all over itself to fund scholarly work in the first place. If you have to spend weeks and months personally contacting librarians and archivists to assemble a picture of what you're investigating, that makes your project a lot less l
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These kinds of people write everything down in a book and self publish it if they have to. I knew a lady who was a nothing groupie and was divorced from a ... well not a star but sort of famous, but anyhow married to him for like 2 years and she talked about it constantly even though it was all ages ago. she considered herself an artist and tastemaker but her most creative endeavor was smoking meth and redecorating her home with shit from goodwill...
well anyhow I digress someone else in that small little
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The first four hours (Score:2)
Here are the first four hours of MTV [archive.org] when it debuted on August 1, 1981. Enjoy.
New Legal Provision (Score:4, Insightful)
If you "un-publish" a copyrighted work, the copyright expires immediately.
Since copyright is a commercial privilege, if there is no commerce, legally speaking, copyright is protection against nothing.
The Constitution does not grant Congress the power to aid copyright holders in removing ideas from public discourse.
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To be fair, the l
Hip hop? and nothing of value was lost (Score:2)
vast hip-hop-related archives, what loss..... (Score:2)
yawn (Score:2)
Larger Implications (Score:2)
We see these kinds of things often enough that it bears repeating and thinking about: There is a definite and hard distinction between content that only exists online and what I would think of a "real" content that can be counted on to exist for extended periods of time.
When I was in college (good Lord, more than 2 decades ago now...ugh) I wrote a couple English papers based on scholarly articles from older journals (somewhere between the '20s and '40s) because the subject of those papers was old fiction th
Oh No, (Score:2)
Perhaps the most significant loss... (Score:3)
Perhaps the most significant loss is MTV News' vast hip-hop-related archives... So nothing of value was lost, but to be fair, MTV lost all value when they got rid of the M in MTV.
Memes, and clutter (Score:1)
There is always an odd thing about old stuff being destroyed (see the other story about the computer museum). Is it history or clutter?
mtv.ai (Score:2)
Library of Alexandria problem. (Score:2)
During the Xanadu project, Ted Nelson referred to this as "The Library of Alexandria Problem", one of several things the Xanadu hypertext design was intended to avoid.
The architecture of the current web amounts to having one copy of each book, each sitting on a server somewhere, and a lot of infrastructure to allow people all over the world to read it, or perhaps ephemeral caches of it. Great while it lasts. But that means if the server dies, the book vanishes, immediately from the bulk of the internet, e