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Comment by Jaauthor | Hacker News Reader

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.

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It had a ton of music news and youth culture reporting over the decades.

Was the reporting any good? Were people reading it?

I'd be concerned if the archives of, say, Kerrang! looked at risk of being lost. Or even back episodes of Pimp My Ride or Celebrity Deathmatch. But I didn't even know MTV had a news.

MTV News was pre-celebrity deathmatch or PMR. That's how us gen Xers found out Kurt Cobain died.

For many of a certain generation, Kurt Loder delivered some heavy news about artists in the 90s.

RIP B.I.G.

Kurt Loder broke a lot of really big news, but to be fair the example that comes to mind first is the death of Kurt Cobain and Biggie Smalls

At some point such source comes as good enough source for collection of very likely true facts. Like when something was released, some dates of tours and so on. Things which they have no point to lie. Or time points when something was reported. This information is also elsewhere, but collection from one source on topic would still be valuable.

Well, yeah, that goes to show how subjective this is: I couldn't care less about Pimp My Ride, but, even if I never had access to MTV News, I can understand how people could get emotionally attached to music and related programs. Anyone remember MTV's Most Wanted with Ray Cokes back on MTV Europe in the 90s? I think I watched every episode of that...

I loved that show. I've struggled to explain to my teenage kids what the show was about and the appeal of it .. they don't get it. I used to tape it to VHS and still have said tapes in my loft, they haven't been played back since the late 90s. I dawned on me how much culturally significant material is probably on those tapes, down to the adverts and little MTV idents and the odd music video. I really must get round to getting them digitised.

I never cared about Pimp My Ride as such - I don't think I ever watched it - but it was culturally relevant, to the point that I heard about it anyway. So I can see that it's something that should be preserved for future cultural historians.

Good is subjective. The value for me is that during the heyday of MTV they interviewed practically every mainstream musician and often had access to them that no other news organization had. They also had series like True Life which were at least initially under the MTV News division. They may have tackled sensationalist topics but at lest they covered them.

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