MTV News Is Back (Kind Of) Thanks to the Internet Archive
Late last month, more than two decades worth of music and entertainment journalism vanished when Paramount Global suddenly disabled the MTV News website. Just over a week later, the Internet Archive has responded by creating a searchable collection of the old MTV News site through the Wayback Machine.
The collection comprises over 460,575 webpage snapshots, which the Internet Archive has amassed over the years. As Variety (which first reported the collection) notes, the archive appears to go as far back as 1997, though it doesn’t contain every single thing MTV News published over the years. Many images in the archived pages also didn’t survive, but the original text of these pieces remains intact.
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The new MTV News collection came about after the site was taken down and the Internet Archive contacted Michael Alex, who founded and led MTV News’ digital group between 1994 and 2007. Alex called the collection “incomplete” but “very impressive,” adding: “It’s like a treasure when you find something you’re looking for.”
Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive tells Rolling Stone via email, “The Internet Archive has been archiving Mtv.com/news for decades and what we have is on the Wayback Machine. We built a full text search engine for MTV News to help find pages. We apologize that it may not be complete. When publishers announce they are going offline we have a better chance of getting a complete snapshot. As a library, preserving cultural heritage is what we do. We hope this is useful.”
A source close to production at Paramount does tell Rolling Stone that nothing on MTV News has been deleted and that the company is “exploring how to make this important content available in a more efficient way.”
While the non-profit Internet Archive collects and makes available all kinds of material (both digital and physical), its best known for the Wayback Machine, which has been crawling and documenting the internet since the mid-Nineties. Over the years, it has created specific collections, like the new one for MTV News, that allow users and researchers to more easily dig through a particular site’s backlog. (Other collections have been made for former digital media giants like Gawker and Vice.)
Last year, Paramount Global shuttered the long-running MTV News division as part of a massive round of layoffs. Since then, the site has been dormant but still accessible up until the decision to disable it last week. Along with pulling MTV News, Paramount Global also appeared to yank thousands of articles from the CMT website and a trove of videos from the Comedy Central site.
Of the decision, a Paramount Global spokesperson said, “As part of broader website changes across Paramount, we have introduced more streamlined versions of our sites. As a result, all MTV News content is being preserved in an archive.”
While the Internet Archive is well-known for preservation projects like this (and reviving the DatPiff mixtape archive), they’ve also landed the non-profit in legal trouble. Currently, the Archive is facing two copyright infringement challenges, one from book publishers, and the other from music rights holders.
Last year, the publishers won their lawsuit against the Archive over its “National Emergency Library,” an endeavor it launched to make its trove of scanned books more readily available amid library and school closures during the Covid-19 pandemic. That suit was followed by one led by two major labels, Universal Music Group and Sony Music, who sued the Archive over its Great 78 Project, an effort to digitize and make available obsolete 78rpm records. The Archive has denied infringement in both cases. The book publisher’s case is currently being heard on appeal.
This story was updated at 6:53 p.m. ET with comments from the Internet Archive, a Paramount Global spokesperson, and a source close to production.
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