The MTV News website suddenly vanished on Monday (June 24). Over two decades of content from the media outlet has been reportedly achieved.
After journalist Patrick Hosken’s tweet, news of the shutdown spread quickly across social media. His years of work were erased for failing to meet an executive’s objective
“So, mtvnews.com no longer exists. Eight years of my life are gone without a trace,” wrote Hosken on X. “All because it didn’t fit some executives’ bottom lines. Infuriating is too small a word.”.
MTV News began as a television show, “The Week in Rock,” hosted by the legendary Kurt Loder in October 1987. Other legendary hosts to follow Loder include Sway Calloway, SuChin Pak, and Alison Stewart.
MTVNews.com launched in the 2000s and was rebranded as an online news platform in 2016. In 2023, MTV News ceased operations due to significant financial difficulties encountered by its parent company, Paramount Global. In 2011, MTV redirected its focus to reality television programming following years of huge ratings on reality series such as Real World, The Challenge, and Teen Mom.
On Monday, when people tried to read MTV News articles on mtvnews.com or mtv.com/news, they were sent to the main MTV website instead.
Crystal Bell, Mashable’s Culture Editor and also a former Entertainment Director at MTV News, followed up Hosken’s disheartening tweet with one of her own. She shared, “Sickening to see the entire @mtvnews archive wiped from the internet. Decades of music history gone, including some very early K-pop stories.”
Another former reporter, Rolling Stone’s Brian Hiatt, tweeted: “This is disgraceful. They’ve completely wiped the MTV News archive. Decades of pop culture history research material gone, and why?”
The deletion of MTV News’s digital content is a major loss for music and pop culture journalism, erasing decades of history and research.