Vice files for Bankruptcy
bloomberg.comSome years ago they had a large audience, me included, who got great value out of their investigative journalism. At some point they started pivoting into some weird form of advocacy journalism and clickbait garbage, alienating their existing audience, and apparently failing to find a new one.
Good riddance.
Isn't it more likely to be the case that no one was willing to pay for the investigative journalism?
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.
Given they are declaring bankruptcy, there seems to be a signal indicating the possibility that no one was willing to pay for the alternative either.
This is so spot on of a rebuttal. Vice’s shift into what they’ve become was a top-down terrible choice from what they used to be.
The rebuttal to that is that neither worked. They wouldn’t have switched if the original style worked. They wouldn’t have gone bankrupt if the switch worked. They would have gone back to the original style of it worked before the switch.
Yeah my comment wasn't actually intended as "rebuttal" so much as an observation that something is seriously broken in traditional news media.
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 agree with all of that.
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.
this is the entire US media at the moment. and even some english versions of european newspapers. i follow the football league in spain a lot but don't speak spanish. i used to get great content from https://marca.com/en--i.e. english version of the same newspaper. recently they made a sharp turn into the garbage/clickbait-y end so that now i have to rely on browser translations of the original spanish at https://marca.com. sad what click/eyeball-based advertising has done to web-published journals.
What happen is that they took market money which means they no longer had to be hungry and do good and honest journalism.
I think you might be confusing "Vice" and "Vice News" the former did the off-beat stories and the latter was sending correspondents to war zones, etc.
Both are the same organization. There isn't any real segmentation between Vice and Vice News like in Buzzfeed (have friends who have freelanced for Vice).
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.
They started edgy (Gavin McInnes was the co-founder), they became partisan. I'm no fan of a certain Youtuber, but he started at Vice News, and he claims that when the sex harassment lawsuits happened, Vice had to make themselves look "clean" for investors and so become more "aligned" with the US political left and became essentially yet another PAC like Vox media or Buzzfeed.
> Some years ago they had a large audience
Were the numbers good though? Was it sustainable?
Not long ago things were looking great:
> 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/...
I had to take a look and those estimates were wildly optimistic.
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.
Wars end and it must be difficult to convince Simon Ostrovsky and Ben Anderson to stay on or even captain their own ship in the fleet let alone get Morris to do something other than pharmacopia.
>had a large audience, me included
I'm also disappointed at the drop in quality. Their reporting from war zones like Syria was really interesting and different.
The core problem is that people don't want to pay for news.
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.
I want to pay for news. I just don't want to pay for every news platform there is on this world, searately, because some manager somewhere decides that this will push the brand (same applies for movies, songs, etc) (not to go against your argument, I'm just elaborating on it)
Agreed.
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.
BBC, NPR and Washington Post are all left leaning organizations funded by governments and billionaires. I don't know if I would call this "getting a reasonable overview of world and local news".
BBC, NPR, and Washington Post are all neutral organizations.
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.
NPR is a "neutral organization"? I suspect that would wound the souls of many of the staff there.
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...
Yuuuup. Like the above poster said, conservatives have gone way off the deep end…to the point where sometimes it’s really ducking hard to talk in any sort of neutral tone.
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.
It amuses me when people call the news organization that censored booing of Boris Johnson neutral.
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.
Media Bias Chart to the rescue: https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart
The BBC is not government funded, it is paid for by British citizens.
That’s how we used to pay for newspapers though. Cable companies use bundling instead and you get a lot of crap that you don’t need but they price discriminate you into.
Sure, but how many people subscribed to >2 papers?
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.
I subscribe to >2 papers. Some people even go as far as purchasing a Bloomberg terminal to get the news – albeit financial – as soon as it hits the wire.
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.
>Sure, but how many people subscribed to >2 papers?
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.
You could also hand the newspaper to a friend if you wanted to show them an article.
The modern equivalent is sending someone a link, which won't work so well.
…so…Apple News+?
I want to pay for news, but:
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.
"currently called "news"" I don't think humans have ever had a source of news free from agendas. At least now you can pick the agendas you want.
I think part of the problem is the distributed nature of news sources. I don't want to have 20 separate subscriptions to different news sources to manage. I would pay for one site if I could get all my news there, but a single site a) can't cover everything and b) has its own biases.
It seems like we're living in the era of the 'Netflix Paradox' - the more our content gets decentralized - the more subscriptions we're expected to manage on our credit cards - but, unlike Netflix, there's no 'one size fits all' for news for most people.
> unlike Netflix, there's no 'one size fits all'
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.
Apple News+? I think you get access to NYT, WaPo, and a bunch of other paywalled stuff.
Nope, neither of those newspapers. More like the LA Times and the Fresno Bee. And a bunch of magazines that are mostly just ads anyway.
I'll check it out, thanks!
I don't think that's the core problem. If it were, then the decline of news would correlate very closely to newspapers' fumbling of the transition to online/internet.
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".
I don't mind paying for news, but I don't want fucking ads if I'm paying.
I paid for the news before i.e NYT.
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.
Why would I want to pay for "news" when 90% of the "news" I would be paying for is still produced for the click incentivized business model?
HN has thirty stories on the front page. If they linked into thirty separate paywalls, odds are I couldn’t read any of them. If there were an HN wire service, I’d probably join.
paywalls are the worst implementation possible
I think they've been doing more than fine work recently. Look specifically at their VICE News page:
It was not quite journalism because they didn’t really adhere to standards though they did dig into issues msm is too lazy or narrow to cover and so I think they had a legit voice.
Some of their reports were remarkable, for example "The Cannibal Warlords of Liberia" [1] - that takes courage.
There's an interesting confrontation over that piece in the NY Times 'Page Six' documentary, which filmed David Carr, the Times's then media correspondent, interviewing the Vice Founders: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLmkec_4Rfo
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.
> 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.
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.
Oh man this is from the really early days. It's where most of us learned of the bizarrely named Liberian fighter "General Butt Naked" for the first time.
No it's not. Vice had already been around for 15 years at that point.
As a fashion magazine.
Counterculture and fashion originally
Fascinating story, and a great retelling on the Behind the Bastards podcast if anyone is interested. The history of Liberia isn’t the nicest topic, but something that doesn’t seem widely known and maybe should be.
or, watching that lanky white boy go deep into the Amazon chasing a frog to get high.
Vice is... well, Vice.
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)
Hope Joseph Cox lands somewhere even more impactful.
I remember how cool their stuff was ~10 years ago.
Won't miss what they became.
Exactly, Hamiltons drug reports, the documentaries about conflicts you never heard before and the more outlandish stuff they reported on back then were great. I havent watched a Vice piece in ages, their new content became an edgier buzzfeed…
The guy (I don't remember who) who did a lot of urban exploring of abandoned (often eastern bloc) theme parks and such was amazing.
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.
Other longer thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35944376
Whenever I think of Vice I think of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia7fUQXskvA
Bummer, I haven't watched much of their more recent stuff, but I absolutely loved their "The Last Week of High School in Gary, Indiana" episode/story.
Really sad about this. Vice went places no one else would go, and did deep dives on topics (drugs) conventional media wouldn't touch.
When Vice's quality went down, did any other independent journalists step into the breach? There are plenty of good analysis channels on YouTube, but I mean actually going into (e.g.) a warzone and reporting from the ground.
Vice's quality went down almost immediately, so there was no breech to fill. Certainly not a breach in independent media, because Vice was invested in by the same array of creeps and ex-generals as everyone else; they were an attempt to sell empire to the hipster children of rich suburbanites who moved to New York for graduate school.
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.
>creeps and ex-generals
You mean spooks and ex-generals?
Username what it says on the tin!
Its easy to take the piss out of Vice, but the world would be a much poorer and less informed place without it.
I liked some of their output. Hamilton's Pharmacopeia is an amazing show, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton%27s_Pharmacopeia
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 do. Was it all good? Certainly not. But they tried to get some money into actual journalism instead of just doing a presentation layer filled with copy paste.
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.
Almost every closure of a real news outlet is a loss to society as a shrinking news market means stronger echo chambers and narrower reporting. Vice does some good reporting and in areas that others won't or only glaze over. Basically, variety & competition matters.
>Almost every closure of a real news outlet is a loss to society
(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.
Twitter for one is net negative to society, at it does is making it extremely hard for people to actually discuss anything.
Vice used to have a lot of really great reporting. To see what it's become now is saddening to me.
They've had some really good content... sensationalist, maybe, but focusing on interesting parts of life few other publications would touch. For that insight I am grateful.
I liked their motherboard columns. Very informative and well presented.
They did indeed do a lot of very real journalism. Something most outlets just don't do anymore. It's a huge shame.
In January 2017 they (Motherboard) published a long and detailed article (translated from Das Magazin) about how Cambridge Analytica had used Facebook data to help get Trump elected, somthing I thought was important for everyone to know about. A year later bigger media "revealed" the same information and it became big news around the world.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/mg9vvn/how-our-likes-helped-...
The whoe Cambridge Analytica story was one of the major steps in the descent of the media into partisan ragebait, though. Political campaigns have long had a much more boring but effective way of getting the data they need to get out the vote which mostly boils down to asking people (and of course recording the results in a database). The Trump campaign seems to have seen the Cambridge Analytica data as a worse alternative to the traditional approach if the Republican Party didn't give access to their own, long-running voter database. The basis for their personality analysis was pseudoscience and I think it was apparently even tested and didn't work that well. That reporting was less about informing people that it was delegitimising an election result that many people didn't like by blaming a website that many journalists didn't like because it had siphoned advertising money away from them.
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.
Their employees only unionized 8 years ago. The rapid decline and eventual bankruptcy of a company following unionization is a common pattern.
And unfortunately, the bankrupt company cannot get out of its collective bargaining agreements, making it difficult to find any buyers for its business units.
Per Wikipedia, Vice started its digital operations in 2006/07. So “only” 8 years is about half of that time
No more Better Man episodes :(
God what a shame, they put out some really damn good journalism.
Anyone want to try to buy it with me? Might be fun.
Makes me sad. I love their content.
Remember what they did to Naomi Wu (aka. SexyCyborg / https://www.youtube.com/@Naomi-Wu).
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...
What a weird plug for Naomi, who for the most part is represented by her partner Timaz. Don't forget they (Naomi and timaz) tried to metoo Ltt.
The journalist you are referring to now works at the verge, fyi
It’s from the time when she was truly annoyed by this episode.
I dislike Sarah jeong but she covered it here https://twitter.com/sarahjeong/status/981558161566920704?s=1...
If you believe "naomi" then you have been duped by her American husband, timaz.
That's a long read, can you provide a summary? I've never heard about this.
Apparently, she spent some days with Vice journalists and showed them around for an article, believing due to some documents they'd sent that they would not inquire or publish anything about her personal relationships, and when they were back they started asking about some Reddit theories about her marriage status. She implies that kind of publicity into her private affairs is incredibly dangerous to her life and can't even specify why without exposing herself to that danger, so she immediately attempted to find out and stop what Vice was going to publish without any luck. This snowballed into a long online fight where major name journalists would tweet at her but not reply to her, making her feel desperate and leading to the Medium posts compiling a bit of her story during all this.