Years Of Black Journalism Disappeared From BET’s Website

Black Entertainment Television’s latest digital strategy is changing more than how audiences consume its content. It is also removing a significant portion of the written record documenting Black culture, entertainment, and news.

BET Digital has removed its written news archive from BET.com as the company shifts its online strategy toward video. HuffPost first reported the move, noting that multimedia content remains available through BET’s website and social platforms, while years of articles are no longer accessible through the site.

HuffPost reported that BET Digital “has permanently removed all its digital news articles from its website to ‘prioritize video content.’” It added that “Years of news articles are now gone forever,” with some journalists having saved their work while others did not.

For journalists who built their careers at BET, the change represents more than a website redesign. Former BET contributor and current HuffPost Culture Reporter Njera Perkins said the disappearance of the work underscores a growing challenge for journalists working in an increasingly unstable digital-media economy.

“It’s disheartening to watch years of journalists’ reporting wiped from the internet so easily and without warning,” Perkins said. She added that the responsibility increasingly falls on writers to preserve their own work as digital publishing platforms change or disappear.

The situation also highlights a broader business problem facing media companies: Digital content may be inexpensive to distribute, but maintaining searchable archives requires infrastructure, staff, and long-term investment.

BET’s decision comes amid a broader industry reckoning over what happens when corporate owners restructure or shut down digital publications. In 2024, Paramount removed MTV News’ website, taking decades of music journalism out of its original online home. The Internet Archive subsequently preserved a large collection of MTV News pages, illustrating how nonprofit digital preservation efforts can become a backstop for commercial media archives.

BET remains an important cultural brand, and its current platform continues to publish and distribute video programming, including coverage surrounding the BET Awards. But the disappearance of its written archive underscores a key reality of the digital economy: Owning a platform does not necessarily mean preserving its history.

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