Video killed the radio star

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Terry Nguyen, Dirt's senior staff writer, on MTV News, the Writer’s Strike, and remembering Dooce.

The Buggles released the track “Video Killed The Radio Star” in 1979. Three years later, MTV aired the song as its first-ever music video, ushering forth a new age of broadcast media, music, and celebrity. “Video Killed The Radio Star” encapsulates the era’s synth-laden soundscape with wistful lyrics: We can't rewind, we've gone too far / Pictures came and broke your heart. The sentiment still rings true over four decades later. On Tuesday, MTV News was shut down by Paramount as part of company-wide layoffs. To many observers, the network’s decline was inevitable in the streaming era. The pictures came, stayed, and finally broke our hearts.

The end of MTV News might be a major epitaph on the gravestone of televised monoculture, but it doesn’t say anything we don’t already know. MTV “killed” the radio star by introducing a visual dimension to music that was broadcasted to a mass-market audience. The network accelerated “the trend for cross-marketing of musical acts and songs with major Hollywood productions.” The modern pop star was made on and for MTV. The growth of cable programming in the ‘90s segmented audiences into smaller and smaller groups, and MTV had to pivot from music content to celebrity and reality TV shows. People have spent the past two decades migrating away from TV, MTV’s chosen medium. In its final decade, the network was just another dated legacy media brand, fruitlessly trying to rebrand towards relevancy. The closest thing to a “new” MTV is TikTok, but that comparison strikes me as too simple, too out of touch with the algorithmic levers that determine viral fame today. We can’t rewind, we’ve gone too far.

REMEMBERING DOOCE

Heather Armstrong, who founded the blog Dooce, has died. Since launching Dooce in 2001, Armstrong, 47, had amassed a cult following for her “sharp, witty, and unapologetic look at motherhood’s tribulations,” wrote Chavie Lieber in a 2019 profile of Armstrong. In addition to writing three books, Armstrong is widely recognized as a pioneer of lifestyle blogging. On her blog, she chronicled details about parenting, like breastfeeding and diaper-changing, as well as her ongoing struggle with chronic depression.

PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

• The Writer’s Strike is in its second week, and Puck’s Matthew Belloni and Jonathan Handel predicts it’ll take months of negotiations for the studios and WGA to agree on a contract.

  • Some context from Handel: “The 2007-2008 WGA strike lasted 100 days, meaning that the studios had already exercised force majeure terminations of nonproductive overall deals, saving them tens of millions of dollars. In the current strike, that opportunity to save money and articulate a narrative of fiscal discipline to Wall Street won’t be reached until the first week of July.” (Force majeure is a legal clause included in contracts to remove liability for unforeseeable and unavoidable catastrophes.) The Oscars also played a role in resolving the last strike.

• Vox’s Alissa Wilkinson breaks down what’s at stake for the WGA, from residuals to the potential for a mega industry-wide strike. (Vox)

• A depressing look at how Hollywood has leaned into automation, even before AI. (Fast Company)

  • “The post-IP writer, under this system, becomes the equivalent of a machine with a semi-consciousness, because so much of the work of writing has already been done. There is a reason Marvel Studios sends their screenwriters to a boot camp.”

• Katie Baker on the art of a good TV party. (The Ringer)

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