Perhaps it is fitting that MTV News,

a youth brand if ever there was one,

never hit the big 4-0.

On Tuesday, Paramount Global pulled the plug on MTV News, a staple of cable television from the late 1980s to early 1980s.

and was best known to Gen-Xers and older millennials for describing the heady music culture of the 1990s.

The influential and audience-friendly broadcast brought pop music, culture, news and politics to a young audience,

long before the internet and Napster fundamentally changed the media and music industry

.

MTV News was 36.

The news department was closed as part of a larger round of layoffs that took place

cuts to nearly 25% of

The domestic staff of MTV and Showtime

reduced by almost 25%

according to an internal memo to employees

from through

Chris McCarthy,

the

President of Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios and Paramount Media Networks.

McCarthy said the move was part of a consolidation of the company’s Showtime business and MTV Entertainment Studios.

Company

also merges nine network teams into one group.

“This is a difficult but important strategic realignment of our group,” McCarthy wrote. “By eliminating some units and streamlining others, we can reduce costs and create a more effective approach to our business as we move forward.”

MTV News launched in 1987 with correspondent Kurt Loder as a standalone program, “The Week in Rock.” Then-Viacom executives quickly saw the potential to deliver the current news in a non-stuffy format to further engage MTV’s core viewers who loved music videos, movies, and the mall. MTV once stood for Music Television,

finally

.

Within a few years, Loder, along with correspondent Tabitha Soren, Gideon Yago and others, had achieved celebrity status amid the meteoric rise of MTV in American pop culture. In 1992, all three presidential candidates were incumbent

Republican President

George HW Bush, Democrat Bill Clinton and

Reform Party candidate independent

Ross Perot appeared in interviews on MTV News as part of their campaign swings.

In 1993, MTV aired a special report, “Hate Rock,” anchored by Loder, which, according to a Los Angeles Times reviewer, gave a “sober assessment of the forces that have united to create a league of race-provoking , to create post-punk skinheads”. in Germany and elsewhere. The following year, MTV News brought viewers a special report on “Gangsta Rap”.

During a 1994 performance by then-President Clinton at an MTV town hall to address the rise in violence,

a spectator Soren

famous question to the president: Is it boxers or briefs?

Soren’s The Bold Question Moment

became a national sensation decades before the term “going viral” was part of the vernacular. That question and Clinton’s answer

(“mostly briefs”)

pushed the boundaries of what was considered acceptable political discourse.

That same year, Loder

famous

interrupted MTV’s regular programming with a special report to announce that Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain had

committed suicide by gunshot to the head

.

we repeat later

Loder sat at a desk in New York’s MTV Studios, holding a single sheet of paper. In a fast cadence, he announced that it was a “very sad day” and that “the leader of one of rock’s most gifted and promising bands, Nirvana, is dead.” He noted that Cobain’s body had been found in a Seattle home and that he had apparently died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Some compared the scene to one from three decades earlier, when Walter Cronkite broke into CBS programming to announce that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas.

At the time, MTV was a dominant channel.

President Barack Obama made several appearances over the years. In 2012, MTV News hosted a 30-minute live sit-down interview with him called “Ask Obama Live: An Interview With the President.”

But over the years, amid corporate restructuring and the advent of the edgier Vice News and BuzzFeed, MTV News’ reign began to fade. MTV architect Van Toffler left the company in 2015.

Unlike their parents, digital natives didn’t have to turn on the TV to hear the news. Social media filled that gap.

MTV lost its fame as YouTube rose to prominence. In 2017, McCarthy tried one

high-profile reboot

from MTV to make it relevant again. This followed an earlier rejuvenation plan the year before with the hiring of several journalists. But despite the efforts, MTV News has continued to shrink in recent years, making it less relevant to consumers. The one-time disruptors that undermined MTV’s relevance have also been going through some tough times recently.

BuzzFeed News shut down earlier this month and Vice filed for bankruptcy amid a tough advertising market for online news sites.

The company’s decision to lay off

almost a quarter of the domestic

MTV

workforce

and close the news unit

MTV news

comes amid severe financial strain on MTV’s parent company, which last week reported a net loss of $1.1 billion in the first quarter of this year.

Paramount is now focusing on building its video streaming channels, Pluto TV and Paramount+.

Staff writer Stephen Battaglio contributed to this report.