MTV News Is Shutting Down after 36 Years

End of an era: MTV News is being shuttered this week after thirty-six years, as its parent company Paramount Global announced it was slashing 25 percent of its US workforce.

In a memo to staff, Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios and Paramount Media Networks president Chris McCarthy said that, despite Paramount’s success in streaming, the company continued to feel pressure from broader economic headwinds like many of their peers.

“Senior leaders in coordination with HR have been working together over the past few months to determine the optimal organization for the current and future needs of our business,” he added.

McCarthy continued: “As a result, we have made the very hard but necessary decision to reduce our domestic team by approximately 25 percent,”.

“This is a tough yet important strategic realignment of our group. Through the elimination of some units and by streamlining others, we will be able to reduce costs and create a more effective approach to our business as we move forward.”

The network was a hit with younger audiences after the Rolling Stone editor-turned-TV host Kurt Loder hosted "The Week in Rock" program in 1987.

MTV News 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 aim at the younger generation that was tuned to MTV, rather than the network evening newscasts.

Coverage of topics like sexual health, the Iraq War, and devastating natural disasters earned the news division and its correspondents Emmys and Peabody Awards, while it continued to deliver news and criticism of music and pop culture.

MTV News created some pop culture moments itself, perhaps none bigger than in 1994, when President Clinton appeared on MTV’s "Enough Is Enough", a town hall addressing violence in America. It subsequently held town halls with Barack Obama, John McCain, Bill Gates, and others, and boxers or briefs would become a running joke still referenced to this day.

On April 8, 1994, MTV broke into regular programming after it had confirmed the death of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain.

At its peak, beyond covering pop culture, MTV News was a part of the culture as were its correspondents. However, as the 2000s progressed, MTV News’ popularity waned significantly as its target audience went online to find their news.

However, the MTV News of 2023 was much smaller and far less high-profile than the MTV News of the 1990s and early 2000s. MTV News was already significantly reduced in size back in 2017 when it largely abandoned a strategy to take on outlets like BuzzFeed and Vice with a team of digital journalists led by Grantland alum Dan Fierman.

The company said at the time it would refocus on short-form content and video in a return to its roots — MTV News used to have interstitials at the top of the hour on the cable channel with news updates. The most recent iteration focused on entertainment and pop culture news and criticism.

Now, with a larger upheaval in the entertainment business and Paramount looking to cut costs, MTV News is one of the pieces that just didn’t fit in the larger strategy at play. 

According to Comscore, MTV drew 6 million monthly visitors to its flagship website in March, up slightly from 5.6 million in the same month a year earlier.