CMT & MTV’s Eradication of Editorial Content is a Catastrophe


Decades of articles, news stories, reviews, interviews, and think pieces have been eliminated from the CMT website, as well as the website of its sister music publication, MTV. It’s not just that the company has laid off all its journalists and editors. It’s that the work of scores of writers over many years—tens of thousands of articles in total—are now gone, and at this point they are unlikely to be reconstituted among budget cuts at CMT’s parent company Paramount.

Sure, some of CMT’s written content over the years has been mellifluous puff pieces on pop country stars that is either expendable or redundant to other articles on a dozen or so other country music/entertainment websites. But this archive also included very important journalism and commentary that cannot be replaced, while CMT was one of the largest and prolific media outlets in country music since its inception in 1983.

For example, award-winning journalist Chet Flippo—who among other achievements wrote the liner notes to the album Wanted: The Outlaws and was the country reporter for Rolling Stone in the ’70s—operated a weekly column called “Nashville Skyline.” All of those columns are now gone. Chet Flippo passed away in 2013, and unless someone has them saved somewhere, they will never again see the light of day.

The CMT archive also including things like CMT’s list of the “Greatest Country Albums of All Time” that has been referenced by Saving Country Music on numerous occasions. It included articles critical to the careers of numerous country performers. Eliminating the articles also results in many thousands of dead links across the internet in country music stories.

For a while, CMT also operated a subdomain called CMT Edge that covered a lot of independent country and Americana artists before it was eliminated in the many rounds of budget cuts at the outlet over the years. Paramount shuttered MTV News in 2023 to the disappointment of many, and CMT’s editorial content has been spotty at best over the last few years. But eliminating all the articles in the past seems especially punitive shortsighted.

Along with being a useful resource to the public, the industry, and other journalists, article archives are often a strong source of revenue for many outlets. Even if the revenue is marginal—especially after Google tweaked its search parameters to emphasize newer articles as opposed to older ones—the ad revenue generated from these articles could easily cover the cost to host them on a server.

But as we have seen in music journalism recently including with Pitchfork, investment capital comes in and purchases outlets, and then guts staff or outright shuts them down believing there is more money to be made in downsizing or eliminating the properties.

The eradication of the CMT archive also calls into question the viability of CMT moving forward. CMT has already moved their annual awards show to CBS since so few young people now have access to the actual cable channel due to cord cutting. The outlet still hosts occasional “Crossroads” episodes and other original programming, but mostly relies on reruns, while most consumers watch music videos on YouTube.

Media continues to be in crisis as it tries to navigate the onslaught of AI, which among other concerns, is cataloging the archives of sites like CMT and Saving Country Music to compose its own content without any human input or oversight. It’s unlikely this concern is why the CMT archive was eliminated, but it speaks to the complex issues facing media outlets today.

One of the risks of operating internet outlets is if the content disappears, there is no physical archive to call upon in the future. Many journalists sunk their lives into CMT stories, many artists benefited from the content, many fans learned about their favorite artists from the site, and many people used CMT’s archive as a resource to understand what happened in country music’s past.

Now, all of that is gone.

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