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The Disappearance of MTV News’ Online Archive Is a Tragedy: Guest Post by the Website’s Founding Editor

In this guest post, Michael Alex, founding editor of MTV News, laments Paramount's decision to remove the site's archives from the internet.

Twenty five years of entertainment history, as reported by MTV News, disappeared from the internet a few days ago, when its parent company, Paramount, removed the site’s archives, along with those of CMT and other outlets — without warning, explanation or comment. To be fair, an online archive as vast as MTV News, particularly with its thousands of hours of video, is expensive and difficult to maintain, especially with site relaunches and other technical issues. But if history has taught us one thing, it’s that archives are valuable — for decades, recording studios threw away priceless master tapes left behind by everyone from the Rolling Stones to James Brown… until they started appearing on bootlegs and the artists and labels began spending thousands to get them back.

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