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Irrespective of the reason, this really makes me sad. Vice had made some of the most incredible content and dared to go places others simply wouldn't.
As a Pakistani, I can tell you it's very rare to see media go there. Even movies that are supposed to be set in Pakistan (Zero Dark Thirty, A Mighty Heart, etc) are filmed next door in India. And other than maybe Al-Jazeera, I rarely see international media reporting from on the ground.
Vice not only went to Pakistan, but they did at least three episodes I can recall from there. And they covered some pretty important things, such as the disfunction that resulted in Pakistan being one of the last countries to still have polio.
I speak of Pakistan as one example because I know how little our stories are represented in mainstream media, but there are many other examples where Vice seemed to be the only ones willing to go on the ground. Other examples include North Korea, Haiti, and Syria. I'll never forget watching Isobel Yeung courageously reporting in Syria while bombs literally could be heard exploding around her.
Can you explain what TF is going on with Imran Khan? Everyone I see talking about it is either American or Indian and I'm sure they're wrong about basically every detail.
It's good what happened? It's bad? He's in jail?
Agreed. Also, the work by Simon Ostrovsky on Ukraine is unparalleled. (And available for free on YouTube).
I am not Pakistani but I was always surprised at the lack of attention too. Pakistan is a giant country with a ton of people and some pretty insane geography (mountains I mean) and yet there is not much media made in general about it.
It wouldn't be beneath VICE to use sound editing to put bomb sounds into takes that didn't have them there to begin with. They quite literally have no journalism code of ethics.
I used to read Vice when I wanted to know the details the rest of the media wouldn’t report on. The last time I read it was a few months ago. I was curious about the real facts around a certain incident. Instead of a unique perspective, I found the exact same lazy story as I saw on every other website. Plus a large helping of the boring divisive “culture war” crap that is so popular now - complete with actual naked quote mining of those the author disagreed with. How far Vice has fallen.
Vice seems to have fallen victim to the increased polarization and agenda-ridden stories that have swept up so many media companies. They used to report on unique angles, find edgy topics to talk about...the last few years they regurgitate the same left-leaning talking points that one can find in any number of other media outlets.
They lost their soul and became what they probably used to hate.
The problem is that Vice kind of stories are costly to produce.
And are not sensational enough to get a lot of clicks.
It's easier to do a typical 'Culture War' fear mongering type content and get easy clicks.
Also, I think we are in an echo chamber where if you don't report on comment on the latest topic, you might be perceived to belong to the other side.
The West seems to lump issues into "Good" vs "Evil". Leaving no space for News media in grey area to succeed.
I can't think of any 'Moderate' News source that is massively successful. Most of the mainstream ones can easily be classified into one camp or the other. May be just degree of devotion to the camp differs.
I just opened vice news from a North American location and went through the headlines. The politicization is through the roof, and the headlines do not match the context. I am sure there is a market for this type of journalism, but it is much smaller these days because every org left and right is doing it.
The funding mechanism of these organizations reveals a lot about the trajectory. Some start out with a lot of seed money with few restrictions. If they start to rely on big advertisers or funding from 'philanthropists', the content is usually influenced by these sources. The best publications I find these days are funded by donations from readers. This keeps them independent and not beholden to those big funders. Fund the good organizations via Patreon, Locals, Substack, direct.. to keep them honest.
I find it strange that it seemingly isn't mentioned in the top comments but the thing that killed Vice was simple:
twitter.
It took down a lot of cultural media landmarks by usurping their relevance, Vice was one of the big ones.
They needed to move at the speed of gossip with takes that were truly original in order to survive. they didn't.
I used to love vice. They had some of the most engaging content covering things I'd never see. But then it all started to unravel when the platform mostly turned into cringey hipster New Yorkers telling me about their preferred way to consume weed 10 times a day.
Did Vice kill itself, or was it murdered? I haven't paid a lot of attention, but it seems like Vice's content started going down hill right after they got into bed with Disney and Murdoch.
Disney... and Vice... Welcome to 2015!
I suppose the YouTube adpocalypse followed shortly after, too, demonetising political content. So, a perfect storm. No more money from political content, suddenly, and now your biggest shareholders, Disney and Murdoch, demand change to keep up. Shame that.
I'm a NYT subscriber, but a headline from them calling another (younger) news source a "decayed digital colossus" feels a bit rock-glass-house-y.
That being said, my personal opinion of them is pretty similar. I used to love Vice; it felt like they really were the news outlet that was telling a different story from the rest of media. Not a different perspective on the same story, a totally different story, and hard journalism at that. Could just be me, but it hasn't felt that way for years now.
Vice had one of my favorite pieces of internet content ever, maybe this is a business lesson about "stick to the knitting" or something... "stick to the pointy Mexican boots"
http://web.archive.org/web/20230128213354/https://www.vice.c...
Publications are the Journalists that work there, and the culture that they create. If this is the end of Vice as a platform, it's not the end of that culture or the careers of the people that built it. Those journalists will take that culture of investigative, deep and sometimes immersive (gonzo?) journalism elsewhere.
Here in the UK we saw it with Buzzfeed News UK, when is was shut down in 2020 the journalists dispersed into other news organisations, some that they had worked with before (they had collaborated with C4 and BBC News on investigations), and have continued their important investigative work. I believe we will see the same with both Vice and Buzzfeed News (US).
Some will cheer its downfall, but there is an important place for all styles of journalism from all political leanings.
Vice and HBO had some good contents in early days. They reported on stuff mass media _failed_ to report on especially following the GFC when America was going through some tough times.
The most memorable was David Choe reporting on scrap metal scavenging in rust belt cities. That one, for some reason, hit me really hard.
I ran across their North Korea report when it was posted 11 years ago and was an instant fan. Shane was compelling and of course the topic was fascinating. Very few people had gotten in there and brought film out like that before, that I had seen at least. Very eye opening
Good retrospective on the inflection point for this cohort of digital media in the generally excellent Odd Lots podcast recently (Search “End of an Era for Digital Media).
Their conclusion on Vice was that it was never in the same league as BuzzFeed or similar in terms of traffic, but had one of the most pure and influential brands in the space.
I remember when Vice covered Russia's invasion of Crimea. It was phenomenal on-the-ground coverage at a time when all we got otherwise were CNN BS pros, and a precursor to a lot of new takes on war coverage. I remember "Huang's World", a jubilant food show that also revealed Eddie Huang's authentic, unfiltered Chinese American voice, who'd go on to success as Fresh off the boat author. Maybe this stuff was too easy to copy or too expensive, but Vice doesn't stand apart as much anymore.
Shame. Vice was always my go to whenever I wanted a peek into a bizarre and unique corner of the world.
VICE seemed to make sense at a given time + place + context:
* Gonzo journalism: "On my way to North Korea I'm gonna stop by my auntie where over lunch she'd beg me not to go"
* Peak hipster: pre-pandemic hyper-urbanised young white collar people who started making money
* Excitement about Web 2.0 weirdness and the over-sharing culture
all of the above created a compelling package back then, but don't seem to scale to a "global media empire" Shane Smith wanted to make, one that would topple the incumbents.
Vice should have focused on their longer form doc content, they produced some really interesting stuff. Here are a few examples:
Golf, Booze & Guns: Inside Boomer Paradise -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jp0nqJ1yrrg
Inside the Wellness Festival for Millionaires -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BbNvim11fI
Scams, Zealots, and Jet Skis: Life Inside the Crypto Scene -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9hXfBo8Abo
The Untouchable Chaebols of South Korea -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jFZge6V_is
"Be A Man”: Modernists and Traditionalists Debate Masculinity -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nE3EQEBzc0
Mexico's Most Wanted Drug Kingpin -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RZoGOc3VCs
Tantra Island: The Search for Sexual Paradise -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UsWj15AFRs
Hamiltons Pharmacopeia -- https://www.vicetv.com/en_us/show/hamiltons-pharmacopeia
interesting how certain industries were never "disrupted" by startups, no matter the amount of hype that was generated in the mid-2010s [1]; banking is a major example (no startup bank overthrew JPMC) but the same seems to apply to legacy media.
[1] Shane Smith (VICE founder) quote about Murdoch during an FT interview: "I have Gen Y, I have social [media], I have online video. You have none of that. I have the future, you have the past." https://www.ft.com/content/61c51d64-4a9c-11e2-968a-00144feab...
Like 10 years ago Vice bought the building that housed my favorite venue in Williamsburg, Glasslands, and then proceeded to do basically nothing with it. So I'll always hold that against them/the VCs who funded them.
They were really good for drugs coverage, and I mean that beyond the "New York Hipster smoking weed 100 times a day" comment someone else made here.
Max Daly's probably the best drug reporter out there, and was the main reason I kept tuned in for so long. Was really the last bastion of their decent content.
As a person from Ukraine, I love Vice for their coverage of Russia-Ukraine conflict at 2014. But their last interview with a Russian children’s commissioner felt like its not Vice anymore. Seems like they been trying to provide an explanation on why russia stealing children's from Ukraine. So i'm not sure what do I think about vice at this moment. Maybe its time to go
Previous story from 2 weeks ago, 133 comments:
I mostly knew it for Simon Ostrovsky in eastern Ukraine. In the recent years it has seemingly become more politically biased like many other papers, so I stopped paying attention - it simply did not stand out anymore.
Vice to me was always just “high quality” news for people who read Pitchfork and the Fader and listened to Danny Brown and Ariel Pink.
In hindsight its “good content” of the war and drugs sort doesn’t feel too far off from the original angle of low-brow edginess that I feel like evolved and predated things like the “dirtbag left” and “El chapo traphouse” with less of a political bend.
I’m sort of confused as to what carried it into being heralded as a “digital colossus”, whose decline is described as part of the “end of an era” next to Buzzfeed News. Granted, once my own “New York nights at 21 edgy” phase tapered off around 2015-2016, I stopped regularly paying attention to it. At least Buzzfeed News had the accolades to justify its merit.
I suspect that around 2015-2016, right around the time when Supreme got sold to VF Corporation and Kanye and Kim Kardashian were in their prime, and Trump first stopped on (or off?) that escalator…there was a “vibe shift”…and whatever underlying cultural tones that everything that I’m describing can be categorized under sort of seemed “marketable”? But after Trump was elected, the vibe shifted again hard, and I guess Vice couldn’t keep up. Their target demographic is aging and the generation who follows them probably doesn’t have the stomach to tolerate their lack of taste and can probably figure out the “war and drugs” stuff on their own.
I don’t know. So much of this calls to forlorn days and I don’t expect much of the HN crowd to feel where I’m coming from.
If you know you know.
This is one of their best videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O16JP0YRKv4
They managed to embed with our elite LRR special forces (our only tier 1 unit) which was very secretive and maybe the only time anyone will see them in action.
Really a shame but can't say it's unexpected. For every incredible documentary video there were ten videos about some skateboarder who once appeared in the background of a music video or about how transgender tattoo artists are the only thing holding up Western civilization.
If Vice had stuck to making sensible documentaries and news coverage, they could have focused on that niche while selling their content to Amazon, Netflix, Apple, etc.... Hopefully this bankruptcy is an opportunity for that.
Vice used to be a really fun magazine to flip through. I enjoyed some of their mini docs but never really sat down to watch their HBO show regularly. They really pushed for growth which in retrospect, should have been recognized as a reach. Wish they somehow continued with a smaller footprint, putting out interesting, unusual content. But maybe it never was profitable. Maybe they followed the same VC playbook of taking on more capital and promising continued, rapid growth.
Never really liked Vice. Something about the way it is filmed, making reality more "dramatic". Even though it seemed on average good quality reporting.
Vice is how I learned about Bitcoin circa 2012 and how I learned about the casual psychedelic mushrooms consumption in Oaxaca, Mexico.
They've gotten away from high-quality docs in recent years (as has much of the media) but the Abandoned series from ~2016 was a beautiful portrait of the underbelly of America and the people who live there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDniDNY03JE
> A group of creditors could buy Vice for $225 million.
So I guess the $400M acquisition bids that were reported didn't go through?
I didn't read vice often, but there videos on the afghanistan war is some of the most intersting coverage of the war i have seen and made the subsequent failure make sense https://youtu.be/BKHPTHx0ScQ
The 2014 Ukraine coverage is brilliant.
Does anyone care to explain why on earth they don't have the "donate" button underneath their Youtube videos considering the number people who (still) appreciate the quality of their reporting on certain topics?
Is it because they get demonetized?
Related thread from 2 weeks ago: Vice is said to be headed for bankruptcy [1]
I really loved their series Hamilton's Pharmacopoeia. In-depth, raw drug making and taking by a serious (though odd) expert.
A shame they geofenced the shit out of it, forcing me to pirate it.
It’s weird that no one is seeing the big picture here. Media companies are collapsing because three companies (meta, google, amazon) monopolized the advertising money.
Vice News Tonight, when it was on HBO, was fantastic. 30-minutes of global headlines moving very quickly. I would have paid $15/month for this show alone.
Vice content is pretty awesome a lot of the time so this sucks