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Comment by Reedx | Hacker News Reader

IIRC, I was introduced to Vice with their fascinating coverage of North Korea:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24R8JObNNQ4 (first trip - Shane Smith was banned from the country as a result)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrCQh1usdzE (second trip years later, where they got in under the guise of a Basketball game)

Unfortunately it's been increasingly hit or miss ever since and now their process seems to be along these lines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw5UzBjgCiI

Also, how is it that so many of these media companies are having layoffs at almost exactly the same time? You'd think it'd be more scattered...

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It's happening in Canada as well.

They're just not making enough money. They're making money, but not enough. There's a large drive to produce more with less, and to reboot.

Journalism, especially good journalism, is expensive. Expensive to execute, and expensive to produce.

And everybody wants it for free now.

Vice was cheap to run, for a time. It started as a niche magazine in Quebec and expanded into yellow journalism with cheap to make, but provocative, YouTube documentaries.

Then it was acquired and it pivoted sharply into being a media and news portal, with a presence on nigh every platform. The content quickly expanded in quantity, and critically overloaded itself in trying to dominate online discussion in every space.

Vice isn't cheap to run, now, though.

And that last statement is a lot of conjecture. Unless you have proof of some conspiracy to dominate online discussion in every space. They do cover a wide variety of subjects, only a couple of which I've read—and they seem generally good, with the odd very good piece.

Most media companies run a small gamut of niche categories: lifestyle, fashion, news, business, tech, finance, etc.

I think their rapid expansion of properties, some enormous, after 2010 speaks for itself. [0]

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice_Media#Properties

Then I guess we just disagree, and it's more a matter of opinion than it is a fact.

> cheap to make, but provocative, YouTube documentaries

That's exactly what I liked from them, but I don't really see that anymore. Motherboard is okay. That's pretty much my contact with Vice.

That's interesting, I would have thought the costs associated with printing a paper magazine would be fairly high compared with digital distribution, though?

It’s rather meaningless compared to what the newsroom costs.

> Then it was acquired

By who? The Wikipedia article on Vice Media says they were acquired in 1999--without listing who the acquirers were--but also says that the cofounders bought it back in 2001. All of the pivoting you're talking about appears to have happened under the original management, in any case, didn't it? They've had investment from a bunch of "old media" companies over the years, but original founder Shane Smith retained a controlling interest. (It looks like Disney will own more of the company than he does once their merger with Fox is completed.)

It's not an acquisition, per se, so much as some of it was acquired and the leadership changed at a time that major changes were being undertaken.

At a time when the executive controlled roughly 3/4 of Vice, Fox purchased 5% of it; other major media have done so. Shortly before this occurance, Gavin McInnes had left his leadership role over alleged differences of opinion on how to run Vice Media.

His departure, the arrival of large media conglomerates as large minority shareholders, and the rapid expansion of Vice into new properties and markets all occur within a very short time span.

They're also falling victim to many of the traps startups do with regard to VC funding. Vice (and Buzzfeed for that matter) are ticking along nicely, generating a profit. But they're not generating enough profit for their investors, so they're forced to jump through cost-cutting hoops that will ultimately be to the detriment of their product.

I wonder if there was ever a time in history where it was okay to just run a business and make some money.

Still can be done. Just gotta stay private.

Even private businesses are at risk of a well funded company coming undercutting them on costs until they sell themselves or fold.

The majority of businesses still work that way. VC backed companies are outliers but they are in the press a lot.

Any publicly held company is ethically obligated to maximize profits as the agents of the shareholders, the vast majority of which only want the stock price to be maximized.

Can only work if everyone whose money you're using to run the business is OK with it.

Really depends on how the company is setup. If you have shares issued, you really only need a majority (not everyone) of the people with voting shares to be ok with it.

There has been plenty of in depth reporting about what was going on at Vice. They knew damn well what they were doing. Pump and dump on an unsuspecting old media company that still had tons of money.

This happened similarly with "traditional" media in the 90s.

Properties got bought up, and owning papers and magazines was a hot item. They were posting large gains yearly, and shareholders were pleased.

When those gains started going down, shareholders became not so pleased! Then the company puts pressure on the properties to cut costs and perform better and sell more to keep those gains coming against a downward pressure that was almost constant. The companies put more pressure on the properties, etc. Many of those properties cut print production completely over the past 20 years and have moved solely online with teams a small fraction of the size they once had. A few emerged less damaged, but still not what they once were financially.

There's a great thread about this very thing happening:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1088503510184927233.html

And I guess it's now happening to the online-native media companies.

It will probably hit tech harder in the coming years too, if these histories are evidence of a pattern.

From an investment perspective, I just don't see how the ROI is there for modern digital media companies to incentivize the 'slow pace' of journalism like with 'traditional' media. That's not to say investigative journalism doesn't exist anymore, but news companies are much more cognizant about 'production metrics' so longer, time-consuming pieces are much less frequent. You said it well: investors want their dollars. It's like manufacturing: more sales = more dollars. More news = more revenue.

The barriers to entry (and republishing) are also a lot lower now. Why sink a bunch of time and resources into a single piece, when another news company could just come along and say "Thanks for doing the work for us!" and republish it for ad revenue with minor edits. Everyone is rushing to be first, which typically results in a first publisher with nearly instant fast-followers. Plus, when news is ubiquitous and free, users have tons of choices to read the story from, so there is always an alternative around the corner.

Vice doesn't pay well either, even for journalism, which isn't a high paid profession. https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Reviews/Vice-Media-Reviews-E2690... https://gawker.com/working-at-vice-media-is-not-as-cool-as-i...

> And everybody wants it for free now.

I'm willing to pay for it but I know not everybody is. Like, the vast majority of people.

It's very similar to the F2P game space. Nobody wants to pay for games so studios release games which seem to have used the laws of economics to extract the optimal amount of money from people. These games don't seem like good or fun games to me but they do entertain a lot of people.

Same for a lot of these articles. A lot of clickbait and shallow content.

"Everybody wants it for free now"

This overlooks the role Google and Facebook play in draining all advertising money from every other industry.

People always wanted their news for free, and it worked just fine before advertising got so concentrated.

> how is it that so many of these media companies are having layoffs at almost exactly the same time? You'd think it'd be more scattered...

I've been wondering this myself.

One possibility is that lots of companies had layoffs proposed/planned, and they've accelerated their schedules to be part of the "wave". Better for investor confidence to be one more name in a followup story than to be your own headline.

Another is that the October-onwards stock drop eroded the prospects of a lot of borderline companies all at once. I'd be a bit surprised by both the timing (well into the rally) and the ownership range (everything from private founder-owned to private Disney-owned to public) though.

Third, I suppose, is that they didn't have them planned but saw an opportunity. If you lay off 10% of your staff in isolation, you might well lose another 5-10% of the best people who go find safer jobs. But if there's a clear industry crunch, it becomes a more appealing way to balance the budget because you can deflect the anger and resignations that otherwise come along with layoffs.

yes, i was the same way. my interest was sustained by simon ostrovsky's dispatches from the war in ukraine as well as the gonzo documentary hijinks of david choe's quest to hitchhike across the US. they have fallen a very long way since then. i stopped reading them a few years ago when it was clear they were unapologetically trash.

I was thinking the same. This is peak Vice for me: https://youtu.be/Yknrg-63674

I think we're seeing it all happen at once because it means the negative PR is spread around and not targeted at a specific organization. Media groups essentially have free reign to fire whoever they want under the guise of a 'current media crisis'.

> Unfortunately it's been increasingly hit or miss ever since and now their process seems to be along these lines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw5UzBjgCiI

Wonderful. I've been thinking about an excuse to post this even before clicking the discussion link.

Episode 2 of Documentary Now on Netflix/IFC is also a pretty good parody of their style. The episode is called Dronez: The Hunt for El Chingon

Documentary Now actually got me to look more into Vice with their 'Dronez' episode: https://www.netflix.com/title/80010778

McClatchy offers buy-outs to 10% today as well.

https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/mcclatchy-follows-buzzfee...

I have a sense that big waves like this are a leading indicator for market as a whole.

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