A couple of days ago, Paramount completed gutted several of its websites, removing thousands upon thousands of pages of content. Among the casualties was MTV News, and the tremendous depth of information they’d reported over a decades-long run. Without warning, the entirety of the site was wiped out. Two days later, Comedy Central’s website and more were also taken down.
Fortunately, for MTV News at least, the Internet Archive has stepped up to make a searchable index of a large chunk of their content.
If you’ve used the Wayback Machine that the Internet Archive provides for browsing old pages, then you know it’s not perfect. So even though the website can pull you back to older times and sites, it doesn’t mean it can do it with ease. In this case though, the Internet Archive has managed to pull things together to make a searchable version of the MTV News site that can lead back to articles dating back to 1997.
Some of the staff at Internet Archive actually reached out to former MTV News head, Michael Alex about trying to assemble a working version of the site, to which he was enthused. Alex stated that “It’s incomplete, but it’s very impressive.” Sadly it’s probably going to remain incomplete. Unless Paramount has everything backed up somewhere and chooses to restore it all, there’s little to no chance that all the articles, photos, and videos, are going to be there.
It’s awesome that MTV News now has its own search function on the Wayback Machine, but it’s also a sad reminder of how ethereal digital content is. Things can linger on in perpetuity online but at the same time, they can also vanish in an instant. A lot of people put countless hours into reporting and writing for MTV News, and while those efforts do become property of the company they work for, it doesn’t mean it should just up and vanish without warning.
So if you get some time during this upcoming 4th of July weekend, take a few minutes to search through the archives and see what you can find. Consider it a civic duty to the MTV generation.
