RIP MTV News
Paramount's mass layoffs hit the division hard, leading to the closure of MTV News after 36 years and the memories that came with it
This news will bring tears of sadness to those who grew up on MTV during the 1980s to the 2000s among Gen Xers and Millennials: MTV News is no more, as Paramount Global announced large layoffs, including the closing of the MTV News division.
MTV News birthed several legends in journalism over its 36 years, such as Kurt Loder, Gideon Yago, SuChin Pak, John Norris, Serena Altschul, Tabitha Soren, Chris Connelly, Sway, and more.
Thirty-six years after MTV News was created to expand the stable of programming that defined the cable channel MTV, it is no more.
MTV News was shuttered this week as part of larger layoffs at parent company Paramount Global.
What launched as a single show in 1987 (The Week in Rock, led by correspondent Kurt Loder) eventually became a bona fide news outlet for Gen X and older millennials who found that traditional TV programming on the broadcast networks and CNN wasn’t cutting it.
Correspondents like Loder, Tabitha Soren, SuChin Pak, Gideon Yago, Alison Stewart and others covered music, pop culture, politics and other topics with an eye toward the younger generation that was tuned to MTV, rather than the network evening newscasts.
Along the way, MTV News created some pop culture moments itself, perhaps none more so than in 1994, when President Clinton appeared on MTV’s Enough Is Enough, a town hall addressing violence in America.
MTV News legend Kurt Loder for The Daily Beast:
Something similar rang down the curtain on MTV News on Tuesday. After 36 years, its time, too, had run out.
Back in the early ’80s, when MTV was a freshly hatched 24/7 fun factory, everything seemed possible. The channel churned out a heady mix of music videos, surreal pop-culture experiments (Remote Control, the game show that launched Adam Sandler and Denis Leary, had a quiz category called “Dead or Canadian”), and much that was refreshingly unexpected. (Andy Warhol had his own show on the channel, and people like David Bowie, Cyndi Lauper and Pete Townshend would suddenly pop up to hard-sell the slogan “I Want My MTV”—a mock-plea devised by the celebrated ad man George Lois to nudge reluctant cable companies to add the upstart channel to their subscriber offerings.)
I arrived at MTV’s scruffy corporate digs at 57th and Broadway, just a few blocks from the offices of Rolling Stone, my previous place of employment, in February 1988. I’d been recruited to help start an MTV news department—despite the fact that I knew nothing about television and quickly demonstrated this fact with a decidedly non-sizzling camera test. But whatever, apparently.
The whole idea of an MTV news department was ridiculous, as many a snickering print journalist might have told you at the time. Imagine this pop-music TV channel, watched only by rock- and rap-besotted youths, having the effrontery to trespass on the hallowed pieties of broadcast news. It was as if nothing of interest to such viewers could be going on in a multi-billion-dollar industry filled with gifted artists, flamboyant showmen, maniacal hype merchants, and, here and there, pitiful clowns and percolating cokeheads.
One of the best things about getting in on something new is that nobody really knows what they’re doing. Or—no, wait: nobody really cares about what they’re supposed to be doing. Especially when what they’re trying to do hasn’t been done before. Early MTV was like that in many ways, and MTV News—as shaped for the next nearly 30 years by Dave Sirulnick, a musically savvy young producer lured over from CNN—was to be similarly improvisational. And irreverent, if I may use a word that’s been beaten into a lie over the course of decades of promiscuous misuse.
For Gen X, in the 1990s, there was one crucial place to get the most important news of the day: MTV. If you’re only familiar with current day MTV, I know that sounds crazy. But once upon a time, MTV News was the place for unbiased, reasonable stories on issues that young people were genuinely concerned about. Kurt Loder was Gen X’s Walter Cronkite. He’s the one who told us about Kurt Cobain, Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur’s deaths. “Choose or Lose” demanded that we pay attention to politics. Loder; John Norris; Tabitha Soren; Alison Stewart; SuChin Pak; Sway Calloway; and Chris Connelly gave us a diverse news team long before it was the trendy way to get viewers. These correspondents didn’t talk down to their young audience, they informed us about important issues and made it easy for us to understand why we should care.
No Fake News:
The facts weren’t skewed in one specific direction, they were presented in a simple, yet interesting way. Paramount Media Networks, Showtime and MTV Entertainment Studios’ announcement that it’s cutting 25 percent of its staff signals the end of an influential era for an entire generation, as MTV News will shut down.
Those people who are doing everything they can to change this dumpster fire of a world we currently live in, took their first steps into activism thanks to MTV News. It started with Loder hosting The Week in Rock, but as the network and its programming evolved, so did its news division. As it became clear that politics was something the network could no longer avoid, MTV made sure to set itself apart from mainstream outlets by specifically tackling issues that its young audience cared about. Climate change, the environment, poverty, gender identity, sexuality and race were all prominently featured before the rest of the media world caught up.
MTV News was one of the first American news divisions to center their news coverage on those who weren’t solely straight White males, and they were rewarded for those efforts. See an increase of AAPI journalists in the American mainstream? Thank Pak for that.
MTV News, the sober, thoughtful, and welcome break from music television’s round-the-clock marathon of music videos, reality shows, and Ridiculousness reruns, has died. As confirmed by The Hollywood Reporter, MTV News is the latest casualty in a series of cut-backs by Paramount Global. It was 36 years old.
A fixture of the network for a significant part of its history, MTV News began as a chance to break up the shambolic state of the then-newborn channel. “In 1983,” former MTV News writer Tim Sommer recalls, “MTV News was a fairly straightforward concept. Once an hour, an MTV News logo would pop up behind the VJ’s shoulder, and they would deliver about 150 seconds or so of music news.”
Most probably remember MTV News in some version of that form. In its most classic and iconic format, at 10 minutes to the hour, the typewriter keys punched out the words MTV News, and the network’s first official correspondent Kurt Loder would appear to deliver bite-sized reports. MTV hired Loder for its first attempt at making news, launching The Week In Rock in 1987. The half-hour experiment didn’t last, so MTV News would take on several forms over the years, including documentaries, breaking news reports, political town halls, and more.
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The early 90s saw MTV News come into its own. In addition to helping President Bill Clinton clinch the White House by answering the eternal question “boxers or briefs,” a watershed moment in its “Choose Or Lose” campaign, MTV News also produced documentaries, including one on the still-prescient issue of “Hate Rock.” But Loder’s professional delivery gave the plucky news media add-on respectability. In 1994, Kurt Loder delivered the tragic breaking news item that Kurt Cobain had died. It’s still considered the apex of the news agency’s cultural power.
Loder would remain a fixture on the network for another decade, and so would a new crop of correspondents, including SuChin Pak, Tabitha Soren, Gideon Yago, John Norris, Brian McFayden, Sway Calloway, Iann Robinson, and more. As a result, MTV News and Loder became cultural icons, carrying enough cultural weight to appear on The Simpsons and in the films Airheads and as a critical element of a running subplot in Ben Stiller’s Jim Carrey cult-comedy The Cable Guy. More recently, a deep-faked Kurt Loder appeared on a season two episode of Yellowjackets.
However, MTV News struggled to define itself in the 2000s, much as MTV had. As the network phased away from music, eventually abandoning “Music Television” from its title in 2010, MTV News struggled to keep up with the brand of news it inspired. As a result, upstart media companies like Vice and BuzzFeed reinvented news for young people, leaving MTV a generation behind.
In the mid-2010s, there was an attempt to rebrand MTV News, remaking it in the image of Pitchfork and Grantland and hiring a new editorial team in 2016 to transform MTV News. The experiment lasted about a year and a half when Viacom realized that an editorial team actively reporting on and criticizing music acts and partners was too much of a liability to its bottom line. Moreover, MTV News couldn’t compete amid Facebook’s pivot to video, with the other organizations similarly trounced by Facebook’s chicanery.
”MTV News: You Hear It First!” was a slogan that was popular with those who watched MTV back in its golden days. It was also a segment featuring up and coming artists.
We remember the days of the 10 to the hours (approximately 50 minutes into a particular hour, ex. 6:50PM) delivered by various MTV News correspondents that aired on MTV (and MTV2 did theirs towards the just before the half-hour marker), and they’ve been phased out since the very late 2000s/beginning of the 2010s.
The journalists at MTV News that I loved most were Gideon Yago, Serena Altschul, Sway, Tim Kash, Chris Connelly, Kurt Loder, and most especially SuChin Pak.
Seeing a large part of our childhoods being shuttered is a day of sadness.
Reactions to this news from various MTV News correspondents:
Chris Connelly, via Instagram:
"I have a ton of memories from my time at MTV News. They get hazier now that I'm in my forties," he exclusively told PEOPLE in a statement. "But as for one that really sticks out? It's that we were this scrappy, underfunded little division of twentysomethings who loved music and still had the emotional memory of what it was to be teenagers, which ended up being a really meaningful combination when it came to having to explain big events to the audience."
"When you think about the reach of that place at that time, and the way we used our microphones," he continued. "I am so grateful for the experience and the folks I got to share it with."
Non-MTV News correspondent reactions:
MTV2/MTV/VH1 VJ Jim Shearer, via Twitter:
MTV VJ and Today host Carson Daly, via People:
While announcing news of the closure on Wednesday's episode of the Today show, Carson Daly, who was a VJ from 1998 to 2003, said the shut down was "sad" and reflected on the impact of MTV News for an entire generation.
"Columbine, 9/11, those are big events on our watch at MTV. That generation did turn to MTV News," he said. "It will be sorely missed."
MTV VJ Martha Quinn, via Twitter:
MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle, via Twitter:
MTV VJ Ananda Lewis, via People:
Ananda Lewis, who was a VJ from 1996 to 2001, also recalled in a statement to PEOPLE how MTV was trusted by artists and fans.
"A pillar of creative and diverse speech is crumbling. MTV News covered things no one else could," she exclusively told PEOPLE via email. "We could get inside the trailer with DMX and Korn as they were taking historic concert stages. Artists trusted MTV News to tell their stories."
She added: "Even though I was technically a VJ, I did many specials with MTV News and know firsthand what a huge loss this is for the culture of music and all who love it."
A little over a year into his first term, President Bill Clinton made good on a promise to return to MTV if young voters sent him to the White House. The town hall-style program in 1994 was meant to focus on violence in America, but it was a question of personal preference that made headlines and helped put MTV News on the media map.
Boxers or briefs?
“Usually briefs,” Mr. Clinton responded to a room full of giggles.
Now, a generation after MTV News bridged the gap between news and pop culture, Paramount, the network’s parent company, announced this week that it was shuttering the news service.
The end of MTV’s news operation is part of a 25 percent reduction in Paramount’s staff, Chris McCarthy, president and chief executive of Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios and Paramount Media Networks, said in an email to staff that was shared with The New York Times.
MTV News and its cadre of anchors and video journalists were the ones to tell young people about the suicide of Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, and the killings of the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur. They brought viewers on the presidential campaign trail and face to face with world leaders like Yasir Arafat, and took them into college dorms in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. They also embraced the messy chaos of 1990s and early 2000s celebrity, as when Courtney Love interrupted an interview with Madonna. They always put music first.
Through it all, MTV News never strayed from its core mission of centering the conversation around young people.
“There were no comparisons, it was one of one,” said SuChin Pak, a former MTV News correspondent. “We were the kids elbowing in. There just wasn’t anything out there for young people.”
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MTV News tried to set itself apart from other cable news operations in a number of ways, Mr. Loder said.
For starters, its anchors and correspondents did not wear suits. They also weren’t “self-righteous” and tried “not to talk down to the audience,” he said. That became especially important as rap and hip-hop seeped into every fiber of American culture.
“We didn’t jump on rap at all as being a threat to the republic; we covered that stuff pretty evenhandedly,” Mr. Loder said. MTV then started adding more hip-hop to its music programing “and suddenly there’s a whole new audience.”
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That rang especially true for Ms. Pak, who was born in South Korea and filmed a docu-series for MTV News about growing up in America with immigrant parents.
“It was a culture shift for me personally, but with an audience that suddenly was like, wait, are we going to talk about this version of what it means to be American that is never shown and never talked about, and do it in the most real way possible?” said Ms. Pak, who was with MTV for a decade and now co-hosts a podcast. “Where else would you have seen that but MTV?”
Just as Mr. Loder and Ms. Soren became cultural touchstones for Generation X, Ms. Pak, Mr. Calloway and others filled that role for millennials. Racing home after school to catch Total Request Live, they watched video journalists report the day’s headlines at 10 minutes to the hour during the network’s afternoon blocks and between Britney Spears and Green Day videos.