*BET has removed years of written news articles from BET.com as the Black-focused media company transforms its website into a video-first platform, taking a substantial digital record of Black culture and journalism out of public view.
HuffPost’s Phil Lewis first reported Sept. 4 that BET Digital had removed its digital news articles as the company prioritized video content. Lewis reported that some journalists had saved copies of their work while others had not. In a subsequent HuffPost report by Taiyler S. Mitchell, Mitchell documented the broader impact of the removal, including what happened to work previously published by BET contributors.
BET Promised a Video-First Future
The removal follows BET’s Aug. 18 announcement that BET.com was moving away from what the company called the “traditional standalone-publisher model” toward an experience built around video and directing audiences to BET content across YouTube, social platforms, Paramount+ and BET.
“We’re leading with video, and we’re putting community storytellers at the center of BET News,” BET digital executive Orchid Richardson said when announcing the overhaul. The company also promised audiences “less scrolling past text” as part of the redesigned experience.
A day later, BET announced a Community Reporting Initiative to recruit local journalists in New York, Los Angeles, Memphis, Atlanta, Washington, Houston and Kentucky to produce original video and multimedia journalism. What BET’s announcements did not explain was what would happen to the written journalism already published on the site.
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Former BET Contributor Says Her Work Disappeared
Mitchell’s HuffPost reporting provides a firsthand example. HuffPost culture reporter Njera Perkins, who previously contributed to BET, found that her own BET work was no longer accessible on the website.
Perkins called it “disheartening” to see years of journalists’ reporting disappear without warning, according to Mitchell’s HuffPost report.
The loss matters because old news stories are more than abandoned webpages. Interviews, profiles, reviews and contemporaneous reporting eventually become historical records of what artists, activists, politicians and communities said — and how they were covered — at a particular moment.
The articles may still exist in writers’ personal files, internal backups or independent web archives. What is established is that years of BET’s written journalism are no longer normally accessible through the outlet that originally published them.
EURweb Warned About This Exact Problem
For EURweb readers, the development is eerily familiar.
In 2024, EURweb examined the vulnerability of Black media and cultural archives after Paramount removed MTVNews.com and decades of music journalism from public view. That commentary warned about Black cultural material becoming vulnerable when corporations can remove years of digital history during business and technological shifts.
There is no evidence BET removed its written archive because it intended to erase Black history. BET’s stated strategy is to meet audiences through video and the platforms where they increasingly consume content.
But intention and consequence are different things.
BET describes itself as having spent more than four decades amplifying Black stories and elevating Black voices. When years of that journalism disappear from the institution that published it, the history may not be destroyed — but it becomes harder to find, verify, cite and pass along.
In a digital media business obsessed with producing what comes next, somebody still has to protect what came before.
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