On the day of his first upfront presentation as MTV president in April, Sean Atkins stared at a colleague's phone during rehearsal. TMZ had just broken the story: Prince was dead at age 57. For Atkins, the former Discovery digital executive hired by MTV last September, the news hit home on a personal level. "It was just a gut punch," says Atkins, 45, who remembers Prince's 1984 album Purple Rain being one of the first he ever bought. Professionally, the event was more daunting. TMZ, one of the many digital upstarts encroaching on MTV's turf, had first-mover advantage on the story. Reaction and updates were ricocheting around social media before the 35-year-old MTV could assert its position. Backstage at NYC's Moynihan Station, Atkins huddled with colleagues. The up-front script would have to be rewritten, the party playlist remixed and linear programming overhauled in tribute to Prince. Big-picture, the task was much larger: how to get MTV back into the pop-culture game it once dominated.
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