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.
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.
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/...
I'm also disappointed at the drop in quality. Their reporting from war zones like Syria was really interesting and different.
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.
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.
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".
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 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.
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.
(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.
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
