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. 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.” (Reps for the Internet Archive didn’t immediately return requests for further comment.) 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 mor.
