It kept its unique voice for a decent amount of time, but it eventually sank into a mode where it was where you went to hear the same things you heard anywhere else, but with a bit more blue language as an affectation of authenticity.
Going from Hipster Mad Magazine to Hipster National Geographic worked for far longer than I would have guessed.
What something starts as and what it succeeds at are two very different things.
So you just made up a story of fictional version of Vice being taken over by trust fund Millenials (whatever that means) and you didn't realize that the content you hate was present in Vice from start to finish of its lifecycle (and may have even made its actual journalism possible). And then, when called out on it, you pretended you did know that all along.
Looking at their front page right now, over half the articles are buzzfeed-quality rubbish:
-“America Has Decided That Homeless People Aren't People”
-“5 Experts Tell us What They Think a Healthy Relationship Looks Like”
-“This Week's Coolest Drops, From Hoka to 'Seinfeld' x Percival”
-“Russia Wants to Build a MAGA Colony for US Conservatives, Lawyer Claims”
-“THIS WEEK ONLINE – Who's Afraid of the Proletariat?” -“I Went to a BDSM Convention With My Ex”
They still have some original reporting, but I stopped going to them years ago because I don’t want to filter through dreck, and certainly aren’t signing up for their updates, in order to watch for decent items.
It does seem like hipster stuff and I don’t understand who would want to consistently read this and who their target market is.
They seem to hire lots of people to write this stuff and are looking to be a “lifestyle news” brand but who wants to be into their nihilistic, negative lifestyle?
Vice always did clickbait / lifestyle, but they also invested heavily in real hard hitting stories that other outlets ignored. Of course they also continued the clickbait / lifestyle stuff alongside it.
For a while the Real Reporting was surfacing frequently, but not so much these days, even though they're still doing it. For whatever reason, people just don't seem to see / care / value that Real Reporting as much (I have my theories...), and these outlets are struggling.
Now it seems like the readers have punished Vice when they went down that route in 2012 and all that got them was into bankruptcy much faster than they tried to predict Twitter's collapse.
Given that they chose to do that to themselves, nothing of value was lost. Henceforth:
Good riddance.
Vice was started by three Canadian junkies (they literally called themselves that), and for years was only available in print in the hippest neighborhoods of major cities, while printing salacious material that later became published as books like "The Vice Guide to Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll" and "DOs & DON'Ts 2: 17 Years of Street Fashion Critiques". Very little reporting.
Then slowly, over the years, the reporting arm emerged as a force to be reckoned with, but it was for "cringey hipsters" first. The old, OLD readership.
It converged on consensus left mainstream media after that.