Do people consider this as a great loss?
I did not liked the sensationalistic format very much, so I avoided them, but they seemed to have done some investigative journalism?
I did not liked the sensationalistic format very much, so I avoided them, but they seemed to have done some investigative journalism?
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.
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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.
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.