Image via Internet Archive
Last month, MTV News’ website went missing, leaving behind an extensive archive of stories dating back to 1997. The lost website may not seem like a significant amount of time, but considering the hit singles of that year such as “Barely Breathing,” “Semi-Charmed Life,” “MMM Bop,” and the Princess Diana memorializing “Candle in the Wind,” there is a sense of historical distance. The coverage of that period in popular culture and technology is deemed invaluable due to the great changes that have occurred over the past 27 years.
Despite Paramount Global’s decision to remove MTV News’ online content along with that of Comedy Central, TVLand, and CMT, a significant portion of the site has been resurrected on the Internet Archive. The archive now offers a searchable index of 460,575 web pages previously published on mtv.com/news.
According to Variety’s Todd Spangler, the collected content is not the complete library of over two decades, and some images in the archived pages are unavailable. However, this new collection ensures accessibility to much of MTV News’ articles in some form for the time being.
MTV News came to an end in May of last year after starting in 1987 with a segment called “This Week in Rock,” hosted by print journalist Kurt Loder. Loder, reflecting on that time in an interview with Rolling Stone, shared his experiences meeting icons like Madonna, Prince, and Nirvana. The closure of MTV News marked the end of an era, but Loder believes something new will emerge in its place. The Internet Archive’s preservation of the past provides hope for the future of digital content preservation.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
