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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.