MTV News

» see news.mtv.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

mtv news was an american cable product at the licensing layer. mtv türkiye did exist as a music-video brand by the mid-2000s, but the news segments were a us-coded thing built around an american audience and an american music industry. by the time i was old enough to care about music journalism i was getting it from the web, not from a cable channel that did not really exist in turkey the same way it did in the states.

the brand was 36 years old when paramount killed it. it began in 1987 as the week in rock with kurt loder, the first and most recognizable face of the operation. the daily news desk followed soon after. through the 1990s and 2000s mtv news ran real reporters chasing real stories around music: cobain, tupac, biggie, the 1992 youth vote, every grammys cycle. it produced a presidential-interview series called choose or lose that talked to bill clinton and later obama with the kind of access cnn could not match.

the news arm survived the channel pivoting away from music videos and survived the 2017 internet-side gut. it did not survive may 9 2023, when paramount announced a 25-percent us staff cut across mtv entertainment studios and the wider networks group. mtv news was on the list of brands shut down that day. by june 24 2024 the website was closed and the archive went dark.

~ the case file ~

~ the kurt loder era ~

for one generation of americans the on-screen face of music news was kurt loder, and that face was on a million remote-controls in the early 1990s. mtv news interviewed cobain weeks before he died and covered tupac and biggie when each was shot. choose or lose put bill clinton on a saxophone-and-soundbite track for the youth vote in 1992. at its peak mtv news had real bureaus and real correspondents on staff with names like tabitha soren, sway calloway, john norris, gideon yago.

~ the slide ~

the channel itself stopped showing music videos around 2010. the news arm tried to migrate to the web and then to bite-size cultural reporting that was indistinguishable from buzzfeed. by 2017 the internet operation took a big cut. the cable-side news desk continued in reduced form for another six years. when paramount went into cost-cutting mode in 2023, brands without a clear audience were the easiest line items to delete.

~ what got buried with it ~

the archive. paramount said it was preserved internally. nobody outside the company can confirm that, since news.mtv.com was taken off the live web in june 2024. the internet archive eventually published about 460,000 archived pages on the wayback machine in july 2024, which is the only way the cobain interviews and the choose-or-lose tapes are still publicly readable. an entire decade of mainstream music journalism for under-30s lived on news.mtv.com and went off the live web in a budget meeting.

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