BET’s Removal Of Decades Of Digital Reporting Raises Concerns Over Lost Black History And Journalism Archives
Black Entertainment Television has removed thousands of articles from BET.com as the network shifts toward a video-first digital strategy, wiping away years of reporting that documented Black news, entertainment and culture.
The move has drawn criticism from journalists who say BET’s website had grown into an important digital archive of Black life over the past quarter-century.
“Years of news articles are now gone forever,” journalist Phil Lewis wrote on social media. “Some writers were able to save their stories; some weren’t.”
Some of the missing material can still be located through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which includes more than 190,000 archived BET stories dating back to January 2000. But reporters say losing the original archive underscores the vulnerability of digital journalism, particularly at Black media organizations facing layoffs, ownership changes and shrinking newsrooms.
Journalists Question Loss Of BET Archive
Culture reporter Njera Perkins told HuffPost that watching years of journalism disappear without warning was “disheartening.”
“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,” Perkins said.
Former BET Digital journalist Paul Meara, who spent eight years with the outlet, described the removal of the archive as another blow to preserving journalism and cultural history.
The criticism comes as Black media organizations continue navigating an increasingly difficult digital environment where stories that once served as permanent historical records can disappear after corporate restructuring, layoffs or changes in editorial strategy.
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BET Moves Toward Video-First Strategy
BET announced in August that BET.com would relaunch as a video-first destination.
Orchid Richardson, BET’s senior vice president of digital, said the strategy was designed to reach audiences on the platforms where they increasingly consume content.
“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.”
The network is also developing a Community Reporting Initiative that uses creators and media personalities in cities including Atlanta, Houston, Memphis and New York to cover stories affecting Black communities.
BET began soft-launching the initiative this summer.
The strategy represents a significant shift away from the traditional written reporting that helped build BET.com into a searchable record of Black news and culture.
Digital Archives Have Disappeared Before
BET is not the first major media brand to remove years of journalism from the internet.
MTV News, another former Paramount property, shut down in 2023 after decades of reporting on music, hip-hop and popular culture. Its online archives were later removed, eliminating thousands of articles that documented major moments in entertainment history.
HipHopDX also drew criticism after its extensive archive disappeared as the publication shifted readers toward social media.
The broader “pivot to video” strategy has circulated throughout digital media since the mid-2010s. Numerous publishers invested heavily in video production during that period, sometimes reducing written-news operations before eventually reversing course or cutting staff when those strategies failed to produce expected returns.
BET’s decision now raises a larger question for Black media: what happens to decades of cultural documentation when the websites preserving that history change direction?
Journalism does more than chronicle what happened on a particular day. Over time, individual stories become part of a historical record — documenting careers, movements, controversies, milestones and moments that may otherwise be difficult to reconstruct.
For BET, a network that has spent decades documenting Black America, the shift toward a new digital model may continue producing Black stories.
