R.I.P. MTV News, iconic news brand
Known for breaking news and correspondent Kurt Loder, MTV News was 36
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.
“We are never going to be CNN for young people,” Tom Freston, then-chairman of MTV Networks, told The New York Times in 1992. “But we will probably have about an 80 percent music to 20 percent news and features mix in the future. And we are committed to becoming more of a full-service network for our viewers, who, contrary to their image, are neither couch potatoes, nor passionless.”
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.
“There’s this cycle that happens, that I was a part of. Someone gets the idea that they want editorial, and then a couple editors who all know the other editors are like ‘Come here, the faucet is on,’” Jessica Suarez, a former editor at MTV Hive, told Spin in 2017. “And everyone runs to that faucet and it attracts the attention of higher-ups who realize there’s too much money coming out and shut it down. Then somebody you bring to your faucet gets their own faucet, and so you run over there.”
Today, MTV News is another casualty of the cost-cutting that plagues every industry. It is, after all, hard to find unlimited growth in reading news to young viewers once an hour. That sort of thing is a loss leader but endears itself to an audience. Elements, such as Loder’s dry reports or Gideon Yago’s emo representation, were value adds that embedded themselves in the cultural fabric. These breaks from the Ridiculousness, TRL, or The Grind made MTV a place to hang out after school. It kept viewers fed—despite its inability to make a line go up. You heard it first: MTV News will be missed.