When MTV News was rebooted at the beginning of 2016, it was heralded as nothing short of an uprising. “What we are about to do here is about the most revolutionary and forward-thinking thing that we can try to do for music journalism,” new editorial director of music Jessica Hopper told the Huffington Post that February. MTV was excited enough about the project to feature Hopper at its upfront a month later—an annual event put on by TV networks to pitch advertisers on their current and upcoming programming. Hopper delivered a eulogy for the recently deceased Prince and explained how MTV News was going to usher in a new era at the wayward network. She would later be followed by Kendrick Lamar, who capped off the night with a five-song performance.

“As someone who came up in a time where music criticism was basically the dominion of 38-year-old white men, who all agreed on the same canon of what was good and who was allowed to say what about what artists,” Hopper further told the Huffington Post, “the fact that we could have such a young staff, such a diverse staff, and that that be considered fundamental to our success here, is [my] editorial dream and my dream of the world.” In the same interview, she said it was her goal to “take pop music seriously,” noting that the staff “have the full institutional weight, history, and support of MTV from the top down.”

The site’s editorial director Dan Fierman, who previously helmed ESPN’s literary pop-culture site Grantland before it was shut down in October 2015, echoed this sentiment. The goal of the new era of MTV, he told the Huffington Post, would be to deliver “really smart criticism of the culture through a music lens.” That MTV News had formally and publicly announced a desire to break the conventional music canon as established by white men at institutions like their own, and instead rebuild it in the image of a more diverse demographic and workforce, was seen as an exciting prospect from the outside.

As Fierman and Hopper saw it, the task required a “radical tonal shift” toward high-minded cultural criticism and “prestige journalism” for MTV News, and by extension its parent company. That meant moving away from empty-calorie posts about celebrities and trends and toward longform reporting and essays. This, in turn, led to significant staff turnover, with resources shifting to newly hired editors and writers who Hopper and Fierman believed could best execute what was a compelling vision: a high-visibility legacy brand bankrolled by Viacom that would publish quality work across various platforms at a time when the industry seemed to be moving towards inane, disposable video content.

In order to lure those writers, sources say Hopper and Fierman pitched prospective hires on editorial freedom, resources, a relaxed work schedule, and a large readership. The website’s traffic outstripped that of many of MTV’s ostensible peers in music coverage, promising a bigger audience to writers who may have been accustomed to smaller platforms. The new iteration of the site also hoped to diversify the landscape of pop culture journalism, and to that end they were successful. Many of the writers hired by the pair would go on to land celebrated jobs and assignments after leaving MTV. Carvell Wallace, a Hopper and Fierman hire, recently wrote GQ’s cover story on Moonlight’s Mahershala Ali. Hazel Cills, also hired by the duo, recently left for Jezebel and broke a story on sexual assault allegations made against indie darlings PWR BTTM. The site was named a National Magazine Award finalist in the “Columns and Commentary” category thanks to three essays by staffer Doreen St. Felix, who recently left to become a staff writer for the New Yorker website.

But the MTV News revolution has now been quashed. Hopper announced earlier this month that she would be leaving the company to take a job at Spotify. Fierman had unceremoniously departed MTV in April, a move that signaled the beginning of the end for an endeavor that hoped to fast-forward an old television network not just to the present, but into the future. Seeing the writing on the wall, a handful of the site’s writers left for new jobs or began writing for other outlets, while those who remained felt as if they were riding out their contracts while waiting for the other shoe to drop. (Earlier in February, the staff of MTV News had entered union negotiations with the Writers Guild of America, which were in progress through this period.) Though MTV News continued publishing articles after both left—and ambitious articles at that—MTV announced yesterday that the Fierman and Hopper era of the site was ending. Staff report that at least twelve people were laid off, both from inside and outside the MTV News team, with severance negotiated by the union for its prospective members. MTV has not provided a hard number of how many people were let go.

SPIN spoke to over a dozen former writers and editors of MTV News who have been granted anonymity by request for fear of reprisal, as well as corporate representatives at MTV. SPIN also reached out to Hopper and Fierman several times over the past two weeks with a request for comment on the claims presented by sources quoted in this piece—both declined to comment on the record.

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The dissolution of this micro-era of MTV News in just over a year and a half leaves us with several questions: Can a behemoth media company like MTV succeed in reinventing itself from within simply by creating a “prestige journalism” arm? Further, what kind of journalism does a company like Viacom—which is largely reliant on friendly artist relationships for its financial success—support and allow? And what even was the intended outcome? Fierman and Hopper both came to MTV News from publications—Grantland and Pitchfork’s longform print magazine, respectively—that had not been economically viable from the perspectives of various suits. Why would Viacom want to attempt it again?

For a period of time, at least, Viacom did allow MTV News the resources to produce ambitious multimedia journalism. Writers traveled for long profiles that upheld the site’s mission, which were accompanied by videos made for both social media and television. MTV was on the ground during the 2016 election interviewing teen Trump supporters, and at concerts in Las Vegas. But when it came to Hopper’s music section, Viacom would prove extremely sensitive to writing that could potentially damage the network’s relationships with artists. The result was a site that published in-depth pieces about wide swaths of music and culture, but rarely turned a truly critical eye on its subjects. Fierman, Hopper, and their writers would learn this the hard way.

In September 2016, MTV News published a story by writer Hazel Cills titled “Kings of Leon Waste Their Moment.” The post was a short review of the band’s new single, “Waste a Moment,” which argued that Kings of Leon had failed to cash in on the promise they showed on earlier albums. “Their sound today is no longer just middle of the road,” Cills wrote. “It’s almost aggressively anonymous.” She concluded by stating that the song “plays like an imprint of the last five years of music—neither a return to Kings of Leon’s svelte roots nor a reinvention worth investing in.”

It was a fairly gentle critique of a band who, pretty much anyone would agree, is no longer putting out its best music. Still, the article became an immediate source of trouble for MTV and it was quietly deleted after the band raised concerns with executives at the network. The band has not returned SPIN’s request for comment.

Hopper called a staff meeting two days later to discuss the situation. According to an ex-staff member who attended the meeting, Hopper explained that the band became aware of the article and threatened to remove itself from the MTV Europe Music Awards. The complaint over the article went straight to executive-level corporate management, and an agreement was reached that MTV News would, at least temporarily, cease the publication of reviews under 500 words. This was because executives at MTV associated those kinds of blog posts with snarkiness and criticism, both of which were deemed detrimental to the network’s broader ability to work with artists who may be the subjects of such posts.

It happened again the following month, when then-staffer David Turner wrote a concert review that focused on the “emotional disconnect” he felt while listening to Chance the Rapper’s new album Coloring Book. (In December, Turner, who was no longer working at the site, posted the article to Medium without noting that it once appeared on MTV.) When the story was featured on MTV’s Snapchat Discover channel, it caught the eye of Chance’s management, who subsequently contacted MTV and allegedly said that, as a result, he “was never working with MTV again.”

On October 21, Hopper explained that the network’s Music and Talent (“M&T”) division requested that the article be deleted. SPIN obtained screenshots of messages sent by Hopper in private channels of the music team’s office Slack. Several MTV employees affirmed their authenticity, and of those that will appear later in this piece.

Regarding Chance the Rapper, Hopper said:

since some of you know a little about this already, just wanted to explain why we took down David’s Chance piece, for the sake of transparency. This information is to stay in this channel, this group. Chance and his management became aware of David’s piece via the repost on Snapchat Discover and subsequently told MTV, amid high level negotiations for linear specials, that he was never working with MTV again because of it. M&T asked us to unpublished and scrub it from social media as they attempt to repair this with him and his management. It is upsetting for obvious journalistic reasons—we stand behind everything we publish. Right now, we are unsure how it may impact Chance-related projects both in and outside of News if the relationship cannot be repaired. Everyone agrees it was a fair and reasoned piece of criticism, a rare note of dissent in the face of six other positive pieces of coverage—and so we are hoping for a reasonable outcome. If you have any questions, all of you have my email/DM/phone, please do not hesitate to reach out.

SPIN reached out to Chance the Rapper for comment about this incident. His manager Pat Corcoran replied via email:

Upon the publication of the article, Chance and I got together & both agreed that the article was offensive.

When we brought our concerns to MTV, our rep agreed that the article was “a harsh shot” & took ownership of the editorial misstep.

From there, MTV chose to, on their own volition, to remove the piece.

We have a long history with MTV, which we cherish.

You may notice, Chance will be appearing in the season opener of Wild ‘N Out tmw night (6/29) on MTV.

Conversations between senior staff and artist representatives on the topic of what would be accepted on the site happened with some regularity. On July 5, 2016, Hopper told the staff that MTV was attempting to book DJ Khaled for various unknown projects, telling the staff that they might have to “nix” any writing on the producer “unless it’s like, KHALED IS GREAT.” Elsewhere, interference from artist reps was so pervasive that some MTV News editors spent part of this past New Year’s Eve haggling line-by-line with a chart-topping, platinum-selling, Grammy-winning female pop star’s publicist over a post in which MTV’s editors eventually agreed to cut one sentence.

Hopper also told the staff in October that “from time to time we do show [articles] to the heads of music and talent departments so they can sign off, or answer any questions about concerns they might have,” explaining that MTV News existed in an “ecosystem” where blowback from artists due to critical articles would land in the laps of other departments at the network. In turn, this meant the editors consented to arrangements that stepped outside the standard practices of journalism. In March of this year, MTV News published a story by editor Hilary Hughes theorizing that Kanye West might be releasing a new project based on a mysterious package that was delivered to MTV’s office. But the post was taken down after West’s team defiantly denied any involvement, even though the story had already been picked up by outlets like NME, Teen Vogue, and FACT. It’s not uncommon for publications to drastically amend or update articles due to factual error, but MTV broke from industry standard by not announcing to its readers that any of the above pieces had been modified in way.

When we reached out to MTV News for comment on the input of artists on editorial and the deletion of posts, they replied:

We do not comment on internal matters or talent relations.