BET removed thousands of stories from its website—and to some, a piece of Black history with them
The network’s pivot to video has journalists questioning what happens when decades of Black reporting and cultural documentation disappear.
Earlier this month, Black Entertainment Television pulled the plug on a generation of Black journalism.
The network scrubbed thousands of articles from its website, erasing decades of news items and stories that not only helped document the culture of the moment but also became a hub for research and a standalone archive of Blackness over the past 25 years.
“Years of news articles are now gone forever,” journalist Phil Lewis wrote on social media about the decision. “Some writers were able to save their stories; some weren’t.”
Some journalists have offered the Wayback Machine as an alternative for finding older stories from BET.com, with the oldest of the more than 190,000 stories dating back to January 2000. The loss of the traditional news aspect from the site still reinforces a broader loss in the grander scheme of Black journalism, at a time when layoffs, attacks on the press and more have amplified its fragility. When journalists found out their work was no longer to be featured on the website, they voiced their displeasure online.
“It’s disheartening to watch years of journalists’ reporting wiped from the internet so easily and without warning,” culture reporter Njera Perkins told The Huffington Post. “As digital media grows increasingly unstable, the burden falls more and more on writers like me to preserve and protect our work from being erased completely.”
Paul Meara, who worked at BET Digital for eight years, called the moment a “nail in the coffin.”
“These companies don’t give a sh-t about preserving history, especially now that the Ellison’s now own Paramount,” he wrote.
The absence of journalism focused on a vast spectrum of Black history over the past 25 years comes as the network decided to change its website to a video-first format. In its announcement for the change last month, Orchid Richardson, BET’s Senior Vice President of Digital, expressed the desire to “meet their audience where they were.”
“BET.com is no longer asking audiences to stay on a page; it’s guiding them to the platforms and creators where our content comes to life,” Richardson said in a statement. “We’re leading with video, and we’re putting community storytellers at the center of BET News. This is proof of concept for a broader strategy about meeting our audiences where they already are.”
The community outreach program, seen as a Community Reporting Initiative, will instead use media influencers from cities such as Atlanta, Houston, Memphis and New York to tell Black stories. The initiative was soft-launched in July, with many creatives wanting to offer a hand in its improvement and expansion.
However, despite the desire of many to add to BET News’ legacy of informing the Black community, others scoffed at the idea, from laying blame at Paramount’s feet to arguing that the “pivot to video” trend has never truly worked for news organizations.
Pivoting to video, a media trend that began in the mid-2010s, led to substantial losses for many news outlets and layoffs. It prompted many news sites, which once rejected the idea of a homepage in favor of an infinite scroll, to re-establish home pages as a reminder that the written word and the inventory for it matter. When beloved hip-hop website HipHopDX scrubbed its entire archive in favor of directing longtime readers to its Instagram channel, the reactions to its closure were similar to those to BET.com.
“It was a crucial vein on the internet for a long time,” Steven J. Horowitz, now a senior writer at Variety, wrote of HHDX’s demise. “Sad to see every byline gone.”
Other Paramount properties have made similar moves in recent years, although those sites were completely shuttered rather than given the option to pivot.
In 2023, MTV News, a treasure trove of hip-hop, pop culture, and music articles that chronicled the living history of certain periods, went dark, and its archives were pulled offline. The journalism arm of the once-popular music channel was shuttered amid Paramount’s then-financial woes and staff reductions through layoffs.
In an ever-changing media landscape, BET is betting on people in its community to help tell the news, rather than on traditional journalists and writers. The issue isn’t the desire to adapt to the times; it’s erasing actual Black history in the process.