BET recently removed its digital news articles from its website as part of a reported shift toward prioritizing video content. HuffPost’s Philip Lewis reported the decision, which left years of written coverage unavailable on BET’s platform.

As an outlet built around Black entertainment and culture, BET’s decision raises questions about how Black stories are preserved. Interviews, profiles and news articles document our experiences, achievements and the conversations shaping our communities.

Some of that work remains accessible through archived copies, but what responsibility does BET have to keep those stories available? What does it mean for Black history when the stories documenting it can disappear from a website overnight?

The value of written articles does not disappear just because a company decides to prioritize video. Someone should still be able to go back and read what an artist said in an interview years ago or how a story was covered when it first happened. For BET, that coverage is part of the history it helped document. Removing it makes it harder to revisit the stories that people trusted the platform to tell.

When the original stories are harder to find, Black history becomes easier to misrepresent. Keeping these articles available is a way to keep our history in our hands and preserve how we told our own stories.

For Black journalists, the work also carries a responsibility to the communities they cover. And who tells those stories matters. These articles were a part of their professional portfolios that they spent time building. And writers rely on published work to apply for jobs and show their experience. 

HuffPost culture reporter and former BET contributor Njera Perkins confirmed that her articles were no longer on the website. 

“It’s disheartening to watch years of journalists’ reporting wiped from the internet so easily and without warning,” Perkins told HuffPost.

Some of these articles are still available through the Internet Archive, which has put together a collection of BET’s written work. According to an announcement shared by Black America Web, the organization has preserved more than 199,000 BET articles and made them accessible through the Wayback Machine and a dedicated BET archive explorer. That gives journalists a chance to find their stories and readers a way to access them again. But people need to know where to look.

BET’s shift toward video opens a conversation about what publications owe the work they have already produced. Readers should not have to figure out on their own whether years of coverage still exist. And Black journalists should not be left scrambling to recover work they need to apply for their next job. Directing people to the archive and helping contributors locate their articles would acknowledge the impact of this decision.

For a platform built around Black culture, preserving that work should be part of its responsibility. These stories helped make BET a place people turned to for coverage of their communities. Their value does not end because the company’s priorities have changed. Black history deserves to remain accessible, and the journalists who documented it deserve to have their work remain part of that history.