Perhaps it’s fitting that MTV News, a youth brand if there ever was one, never hit the big 4-0.
On Tuesday, Paramount Global pulled the plug on MTV News, a cable television staple from the late 1980s through the early aughts, and was particularly well-known — especially to Gen-Xers and older millennials — for chronicling the heady music culture of the ’90s.
The influential and crowd-pleasing telecast brought pop music culture, news and politics to young audiences, long before the internet and Napster changed the industries of media and music in fundamental ways.
The news division was shuttered as part of a larger round of layoffs that saw MTV and Showtime’s domestic staff cut by nearly 25 percent, according to an internal note to employees from Chris McCarthy, president of Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios and Paramount Media Networks.