MTV News is shutting down after 36 years on the air. According to a report by Variety, 25% of employees across Showtime, MTV Entertainment Studios and Paramount Media Networks have been laid off, which has sadly become the death knell for MTV News.
Variety further reports that a memo to staff by Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios and Paramount Media Networks president Chris McCarthy notes that Paramount has been successful in their streaming efforts, but "we continue to feel pressure from broader economic headwinds like many of our peers" and that "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."
"As a result, we have made the very hard but necessary decision to reduce our domestic team by approximately 25%," McCarthy said. "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. Today we will notify employees whose positions are being impacted with leaders communicating the news directly to those teams/or individuals. These meetings will be followed by individual 1:1s with our HR partners."
So y'know, all the corporate roundabout speak for "tough shit, thanks for everything, and we'll see some of you later" that usually accompanies those types of emails.
MTV News started off in the late '80s with Kurt Loder and The Week In Rock. MTV News expanded into political coverage in 1992 with their "Choose or Lose" segment, and had a pretty strong digital presence throughout the 2000s. MTV News suffered a major blow in 2017 when there was a pivot to video (a sentence you never, ever want to hear as an employee), which saw most of the editorial staff laid off.
