MTV news website goes dark, archives pulled offline

I think more broadly, a problem that needs to be solved for journalists is archival rights or something for their work. In the past, you could just buy newspapers or keep copies of your works after they were published. You can still do that now, but it's not as important until it goes down. It would be better to negotiate into contracts something like archival rights to writing, or at least a permanent credit/record.

Journalism is unique in that it's almost always public in some form. It should be a reasonable expectation that it stays in its original medium, or is accessible in archives if that medium vanishes. Major newspapers often offer reprints or back issues. NYT offers the "Times Machine" [0] with basically everything they've ever run digitally. This should be the standard, not the exception.

[0]: https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/browser

This sets a scary precedent regarding reporting and the capture of history in general. If all of a few decades worth of music history disappears due to a companies financial health(no company is around forever). We basically lose that data forever and history is wiped out. With most news data now being online this could happen to any news going forward and a great loss to society. Internet Archive does a good job(they are a very small outfit) but there should be a organization (non-profit that all news/media sites could pay into) that would archive everything ever created online so as to have this content available for future generations.

I wonder whether that data has more value to the owner if it's not online -- make AI companies pay for it if they want it.

And maybe take legal action against those who've already used it, for training and knowledge bases, without licensing it.

That'd be different than a company simply not wanting to incur the small costs of keeping it online. (Still sounds crappy, but it's not "for nothing".)

This really only tells us that there's nothing special about digital archives. They can come and go just like physical archives. If you want something to be available for longer than it's commercial lifespan you need to put it in a library or an archive that's designed and funded with the specific goal of preserving things.

MTV did a ton of documenting mainstream music and youth culture over the decades. It is a shame it is largely inaccessible.

I encourage everybody to check out your local magazine rack. Many music publications (Rolling Stone, Uncut, others) are putting out "book-a-zines" or "Ultimate Guide to Band X" style compilations containing original photos, interviews and reviews from the magazines ' archives. In a world where anything online is link-rotting or pay walled, or copyrighted by Getty images, these are a way to build your own collection of non-404'ing information.

I have a few of these: Nirvana, Joy Division, Pink Floyd, Uncut Guide to Shoegaze. For $15 or so each, it's not a bad deal, about the cost of a CD. Full-size colour pictures look way better than the low res images found online too.

This is happening everywhere, use of archive.org is now mandatory when looking at my bookmarks folder.

You’d think they’d want the mtv brand associated with the history of music and being a good custodian of culture. If not then what is the brand?

Is this stuff not in the Internet Archive? Why not? I'm not disparaging; I'm just asking what the reason is. What causes something to be in the Internet Archive in the first place?

Can someone explain why wayback machine and the other archive services aren’t filling in this gap/working in this case? (I.e., the article seems to say all archives are gone , I understand why mtvnews.com is now in-accessible, but why would the wayback machines archives be gone also ,just because the parent/ source website was shut down?) tks

the thing that stood out the most to me here was that apparently Paramount has 3 co-CEOs...

There's also content being "lost" to paywalls / sign-up walls. A couple of days ago I went to access an article I've shared to others a couple of times a year for close to 20 years. Not now! "Must sign up and sign in to view content".

We were promised 21st Century jetpacks and all we get are same old dated mindsets, dated biz models, etc.

p.s. While we're on the subject, anyone want to recommend a Firefox extension that does full page capture (read: not a screen shot)? And then a simple in-browser DB for saving / cataloguing with tags or similar?

A valuable resource documenting decades of cultural and musical history is lost. This can hinder future research... And nostalgic exploration. Such a pity!

Probably selling rights to someone to train models...

was this done with no announcement? with no chance for external groups to archive?

The moment media went digital, journalism died. Coincidence?

The Internet Archive should receive significant government funding. It's insane we let cultural treasures disappear into the wind when we can preserve them for negligible costs.

Waaay overdue to roll back copyright to it's original limits. There's a lot of history that's just wiped out and it's a great loss to humanity.

Exactly why piracy is and always has been at the core of historical preservation

The thing is, I don't know that MTV news was much of a resource and I don't know that losing it is going to change life for anyone.