Posted in: TV | Tagged: mtv, MTV News, paramount

MTV News Finds New Life: Internet Archive Housing 450,000+ Articles

A week after learning that Paramount had purged MTV/MTV News' online archives, Internet Archive is now housing well over 450,000+ articles.

Last week, reports hit that Paramount Global had purged the archives from the Comedy Central, MTV (including MTV News archives), CMT, TV Land, and Paramount Network websites. In the image above, we've included screencaps of the pop-up message you receive when you visit each respective site (with much of the content that's gone MIA not available on Paramount+, despite what the message might advise). Now, it appears that a savior has arrived – at least for more than 460,000 web pages previously available on MTVNews.com. Thanks to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, we now have a searchable collection of a respectful chunk of our pop culture heritage. Michael Alex, founder, MTV News' digital group, noted that while the collection is obviously "incomplete," it is still "very impressive" – noting that "It's like a treasure when you find something you're looking for."

"Envisioned from the very beginning as a resource for music fans, the MTV News digital archive was immediately successful…within a year of launch, the news archive had more pages read on a daily basis than the news of the day. Music fans always wanted more information, more context, more history, and the archive made it available," Alex wrote in a LinkedIn post last week when the news first broke. 'When we launched MTV News digital-first news coverage in November 1996, we planned for the archive becoming a resource for music fans, a place for anyone newly obsessed with an artist to be able to dig deep and follow the stories of music makers from the beginning."

Alex continued, "The saying 'old news is no news' didn't apply to music news…current fans want to know what they've missed, new fans want to know the history. Music fans loved what they loved, and we were there to support them in that. As mtvnewsdotcom grew in size and audience the archive became increasingly important for hard core music fans (witness in particulary the hip-hop coverage.) That Paramount has removed it is a huge loss and a waste of something extremely valuable to anyone who cares about the history of great music."

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