Image from the Internet Archive
Last month, the MTV News website MissingAt least, that was the case for most of us, including an archive of articles stretching back to 1997. For some of us, especially those of us old enough to have grown up watching MTV on actual television, that doesn’t seem like a particularly long time. But when you remember that year’s hit singles—“Barely Breathing,” “Semi-Charmed Life,” “MMMBop,” the Princess Diana memorial “Candle in the Wind”—it starts to feel a bit historical distance. And when you consider everything that’s happened in the past 27 years, not just in music but in entertainment in general, coverage of a period of major change in pop culture and technology can seem invaluable.
Thus, despite Paramount Global’s corporate decision to remove the online content of MTV News (as well as Comedy Central, TV Land, and CMT), the majority of the site has been resurrected in the Internet Archive and is “A searchable index of 460,575 web pages Previously published at mtv.com/news.
So report varietyTodd SpanglerThe company points out that this content “is not comprehensive, representing everything published over 20 years, and some images on the MTV News archive pages on the service will not be available. However, for the time being, this new collection ensures that many of MTV News’ stories will continue to be accessible in some form.”
MTV News itself ended last May. It began as a segment called “This Week in Rock” in 1987 and was hosted by a print journalist named Kurt Loder. Rolling Stone “Everyone who was writing about what was then called rock music had a very negative view of MTV,” recalls Loder. The magazine interviewBut by choosing to immerse himself in this new form of infotainment, he was introduced to artists like Madonna, Prince and Nirvana.Death of singer Kurt Cobain “I got to fly wherever I wanted and do whatever I wanted,” Lauder said. “It was a great time. I don’t know if I’ll ever come back, but something will come back, whatever that may be.” The Internet Archive is here to preserve it.
Related content:
Check out the first two hours of the MTV premiere (August 1, 1981)
All the music on MTV 120 Minutes: 2,500 YouTube Video Playlist
MTV Complete Collection Headbangers Ball: Watch 1,215 videos from the heyday of metal videos
The Magazine Rack, the Internet Archive’s collection of 34,000 digitized magazines
Check out Johnny Cash’s moving final interview and final performance, “Death, Where is Thy Sting?” (2003)
Based in Seoul, Colin MaOnershall Writing and broadcastingHe has written papers on cities, languages, and cultures, and his projects include the Substack newsletter. Books about cities And books A city without a state: Walking through 21st-century Los Angeles. Follow us on Twitter CollinhamOnershall or Facebook.
