After nearly three decades of editorial content was suddenly pulled from the colossal MTV News digital archive last week, Internet Archive has restored the lost music journalism with a searchable MTV News database.
With Wayback Machine coming to the rescue the way it so often seems forced to, 460,575 webpages previously published to mtv.com/news — dating back to the website's 1996 inception — are available to access here. You can search them using an index organized by anchor types, all parts of URLs, MIME types, HTTP status codes and language.
MTV News shuttered in 2023, ending a 36-year run following a series of layoffs at parent company Paramount Global (f.k.a. Viacom), which MTV was sold to in 1983 after its 1981 launch by Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment. The MTV News division began covering music and pop culture news in 1987, beginning with the show The Week in Rock. Once host Kurt Loder confirmed the news of Kurt Cobain's death in 1994, the programming became much more consistent.
MTV dropped "music television" from its logo in 2010, but it continued to produce music journalism up until MTV News was shut down last year — although writers faced layoffs in 2017 after the company aimed to pivot back to video.
