Vice files for Bankruptcy
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Good riddance.
You see this everywhere. The clickbait is a funding source for the real work. Journalists almost never want to push garbage on the public --- they're usually forced to by management, either as an attempt at growth-at-all-costs or as a revenue source of last resort.
It is a business, and so it is reasonable to have to just accept that a certain amount of sensationalism, click-bait and other "metric-increasing" tactics will be omnipresent so long as "traditional news media" continues to exist in some form. I've read that this has always been the case anyway, and people complaining about it is as old as people complaining about taxes. But clearly the target audience is just not buying what they are selling these days, no matter what that is.
I suspect that, in addition to the Internet putting serious competitive pressure on print media, social media is also playing a big factor in the demand for traditional news outlets. In current year, everyone is carrying a camera with them at all times and the ability to publish content instantly. When most people are so "connected", such that they can find out what is happening around them the instant it happens in a quick clip or headline, what use is there for long-form articles?
I would just say that, the internet allows for more niche things in general. If you want more sensationalized articles, it’s got that, if you want more rational takes, it’s got that. I can get exactly the flavor I want and in that sense why would I watch something that by definition has to cater to everyone. Similar to music, why listen to the radio when I could listen to the exact music I want 24/7.
Less a bug with news organizations and more a feature that the internet enabled. This same thing has played out in a dozen different industries for the same reason.
Were the numbers good though? Was it sustainable?
> 2012 revenue of $175 million, 2014(e) revenue of $500 million, 2016(e) revenue of $1 billion(!)
> "[P]rofit margins targeted to widen to 50% of sales from 34% now"
https://www.forbes.com/sites/pascalemmanuelgobry/2014/03/31/...
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/06/inside-vice-media-sh...
Near the end is this:
> But the underlying driver of Vice’s success has always been the close connection between its editorial work and its work for brands.
I’m not sure their great investigative journalism was ever self-sustaining.
You can see this right here on HN. Just submit a paywalled article and the top comment will be a link to the archive.org version.
Growing up, the family had the Washington Post and Economist, plus the nightly news on one of the major broadcast stations. Some people might also get the WSJ. I can't think of anybody I knew who got more than that.
The group who does pay for news, as I've alluded to, are people in the financial sector, or those who's knowledge of the news affects or is inherent to their job.
Business people, basically.
On a personal note, in high-school I competed on a team competition – Academic Decathlon – and my testing subject was Current Events. So I may be somewhat outside the norm.
I subscribe to the Financial Times, the Economist, WSJ, Bloomberg, and more.
My parents may have been more well off so this might not be representative, but it wasn't just papers; we also subscribed to several magazines. Growing up I remember we had:
* New York Times
* Wall Street Journal
* The Economist Magazine
* Time Magazine
* Nintendo Power
* Highlights for Children
I remember my Aunt subscribing to Vogue, Ebony and Reader's Digest, on top of the finance publications she and my dad were subscribed to. 30 years ago, Vice might have existed as a magazine, not a major publication.
The modern equivalent is sending someone a link, which won't work so well.
My solution was to subscribe to one reasonable newspaper (Washington Post). Between that, free BBC content, and NPR, I think I get a reasonable overview of world and local news.
But, that does mean I miss breaking investigative news from other sources. At least until it's picked up elsewhere or made available elsewhere. It's a bummer at time, but paying for a large subset of possible news sources would cost 10x+ what I pay now.
WaPo is the home of neocons Hugh Hewitt and Jennifer Rubin. When I first started reading WaPo, they were considered (and they considered themselves to be) far right neocons. These days, Ms. Rubin would be classified as a moderate (and considers herself to be an independent) and Mr. Hewitt is frequently accused of being a RINO. They haven't changed their political stances (if anything, Hewitt is more conservative now than he was before); it is simply that the Republican Party has moved extremely far to the right in the past decade and what was once considered extreme is now moderate.
See, for example: "New NPR Ethics Policy: It's OK For Journalists To Demonstrate (Sometimes)"
https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2021/07/29/1021802...
I read a lot of Reuters during the trump admin and boy you could hear their tone subtly slip the whole time and when the election results were being contested, journalists everywhere were straight up calling it baseless and inflammatory. Not very neutral but also just facts. And at some point, trying to sound neutral no matter the circumstances is going to sound insane.
The WaPo isnt even neutral by American standards - it has an unusually tight knit relationship with the pentagon.
Essentially those 3 organizations provide 3 different angles on what the pentagon wants you to hear.
A gaming would've been a good example - there's Steam and there's everything else, but is this the case for video streaming? One either shells out a noticeable sum for Netflix/Hulu/Disney+/ESPN+/HBO Max/Amazon Prime Video/Apple TV+/Paramount+/Peacock/... combo (with a number of those free on some year-long promotion), or, I've heard, as the those year-long trials come to end, fragmentation progresses, and diversity and quality of media on any single individual platform declines, people are simply starting to sail back to the high seas.
Maybe if this stream dies (and companies stop blaming it on password sharing or whatever, but realize no one is paying because it's not worth it anymore) there will be some partnerships and larger package deals. But I'm skeptical, as no one had solved how to slice the pie. Microtransactions were proposed to solve this but any attempts at those had ultimately failed.
But the decline starts much earlier in the 1980s/1990s with consolidation, infotainment newsfluff, disappearance of dailies in major cities. I can summarize in a single word, "Ganett".
1. I don't want to pay for what is currently called "news". That is, agenda-based editorials and selective fact-choosing.
2. I want to be able to subscribe and unsubscribe easily, from my phone, without dark patterns, or having to talk to a human.
The closest thing I have right now is paying for https://sumi.news and glancing at headlines.
only for them to take a political stance and discredit Bernie for their favorite candidate Hillary.
and even, then if you pay - are you gonna log in everytime before you read an article.
cancelling subscriptions is a pain for some of these media things
I prefer the guardian approach - where they ask for a donation. then yearly I put something towards that.
yeah their revenue numbers won't be strong as back then when people bought dead tree copies daily.
but if you think of media as a sunday type issue - I mean most important stories would have been a sunday type issue anyway. then the revenue they get is comparable.
I'm also disappointed at the drop in quality. Their reporting from war zones like Syria was really interesting and different.
That said, a LOT of Vice news itself is freelanced by reporters in the middle of their own projects such as documentaries, publishing projects, etc.
I think part of the Vice pitch was always that it was a disruptor of the old-fashioned media narratives, uncovering the stories to which boring old media was blind. I tend to agree with Carr's implicit critique here that we undervalue the journalistic, societal value of the sort of unglamorous coverage in which traditional media invests and at which it excels.
That was a pitch that they stole from Unreported World [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0477545/], and like the new Krishnan Guru-Murthy-produced version of Unreported World, Vice strictly stuck to areas of current US interest and tightly followed CIA and administration talking points.
I will miss their dispatches from war zones (I want to say "unfiltered", but they are filtered of course) and their Motherboard (Joseph Cox himself carries Motherboard on his back)
Won't miss what they became.
They were very willing to publish people writing about all kinds of weird stuff (from an international perspective); it's a shame they couldn't translate that ethos into the modern internet era.
Vice started as a reasonable imitation of Journeyman Pictures [https://www.journeyman.tv/] that did drugs and didn't think women should host documentaries. Then it found a few bilingual fashion models to mix in with its middle-aged beardos, and sold itself to the borg for a billion dollars. Its secret weapon for profitability was a fleet of upper-middle class children who were supported by their parents in NY apartments, so you didn't have to pay them. Unfortunately, they were repulsive to audiences.
edit: so the answer is and was Journeyman Pictures.
You mean spooks and ex-generals?
I did not liked the sensationalistic format very much, so I avoided them, but they seemed to have done some investigative journalism?
(X)
Only if they are good outlets. The loss of Gawkers was absolutely a net positive to society for example. Vice used to be absurdly good, mind you, but that was 10-15 years ago at best. There may not be that much of a loss here either, like Gawker.
On the other hand, if stuff like AP, Reuters, or CS Monitor closed down, THAT would be an actual loss. Those people actually still do good investigative journalism now and then.
That's a tough problem in this day and age of reader-paid news simply not happening. That's not happening not only because we are so greedy, it's also not happening because we certainly don't want to get back to only reading that one paper we happen to be subscribers of, as it used to be before the web.
We desperately need a "spotify for news", preferably with a two tier setup that allows a "play" of something investigative to have more weight than simple news agency copypasta. And preferably not with a central giant gatekeeper squeezing content suppliers as hard as possible but as a bottom-up coop, with reverse syndication (subscribers of A get elevated guest access at B and subscribers at B get guest at A) that redistributes a percentage of subscription revenue according to the spotify model (play/read counts). But as long as that doesn't exist, Vice was the closest thing we had to get post-print journalism funded.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/mg9vvn/how-our-likes-helped-...
For bonus partisan points, the previous Obama campaign had used people's Facebook interactions for voter targetting in a way that was ethically fishy, and this was spun as a clever and positive thing. Imagine if some of your friends were secretly siphoning off all your social media interactions with them into a political party algorithm that decided which of the people they talked to could be most effectively convinced to vote Obama - that's basically how their system worked, and it got glowing coverage after the fact in places like the New York Times that boasted about how effective it could be for commercial advertising too.
And unfortunately, the bankrupt company cannot get out of its collective bargaining agreements, making it difficult to find any buyers for its business units.
Vice's behaviour was unethical at best and Naomi - who is a wonderful tech content creator - got into significant trouble putting her business at serious risk.
Why would you do that as a "journalist"?
https://medium.com/@therealsexycyborg/shenzhen-tech-girl-nao...
The journalist you are referring to now works at the verge, fyi
If you believe "naomi" then you have been duped by her American husband, timaz.