BET Digital News Wipeout Leaves Dent In Black Journalism

Over the past four decades and counting, BET has been a prime destination for all things Black culture. That generational impact only increased with the turn of the 21st century, as BET.com became a web portal that helped bring Black entertainment into the fast-paced digital world.

Sadly, BET Digital is reportedly making a huge content shift with the recent decision to remove its decades-spanning archive of online news articles.

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HuffPost reporter Phil Lewis shed light on the news late last week (seen above), making note that some journalists were able to preserve their work while others weren’t as fortunate. The move appears to be a call on behalf of parent company Paramount in order to prioritize video content, similar to the fate given to MTV News a few years back that later affected the network overall. Articles in the BET.com news section now redirect to video reports from on-air talent, separate from the outlet’s pre-existing digital content offerings with BET Talks, The Jason Lee Show, For The Fellas, BET Amplified Live, a cooking series titled Taste That and The Shift with Tai Beauchamp.

Many past contributors have shown upset in discovering past work has been potentially deleted forever. HuffPost culture reporter Njera Perkins openly expressed her feelings of frustration, telling the outlet, “It’s disheartening to watch years of journalists’ reporting wiped from the internet so easily and without warning,” further adding, “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.”

The move seems to also align with BET’s “Community Reporting” initiative announced last month that appears to rely heavily on local content from freelance contributors. Interested parties are encouraged to apply via the BET Creator Studio hub, which, according to the site, “brings emerging and established journalists into the fold, giving reporters the tools, mentorship, and reach to tell the stories shaping Black communities.” It gives the option to either submit an article as an on-camera reporter or pitch an entire show idea from top to bottom.

While we can get behind the grassroots reporting idea, it doesn’t quite explain why over 25 years of digital news had to be sacrificed in the process. Thankfully, The Internet Archive has made accessing old articles quite the easy task by creating a web portal backup specifically for BET.com.

Is BET Digital bringing its dot-com era to an end far too soon? Keep scrolling to see how many are reacting to the news on social media:

1. i feel for those journalists. BET has the money and tech to archive those articles… idk why they would make a drastic decision like that.

via @ronniessance