Some 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is there a point after which an organisation goes woke, but doesn't go broke, that we can say "they probably didn't go broke because they went woke"? Because they were "woke" for quite a long time.
The same source extrapolates that a third of all US newspapers is set to close by 2025.
Do you honestly believe that this bankruptcy wave only affects "woke" newspapers?
Also, your "Get woke, go broke" comment is based on the idea that if a newspaper you follow starts reporting things you don't like or personally agree them protest is a healthy or desirable course of action, as if depriving funds from a business will eliminate things you don't like or understand. I'm not sure this is a healthy take, and is reminiscente of extremism.
"Voting with your wallet" isn't particularily unheard of. I dont understand why you seem to make a difference here just because the topic is leaning a little towards politics.
Probably very different audiences to Vice. Most people I know who watch a lot of Netflix are the same that used to watch cable TV all day. And I'm not sure who exactly are Disney's target audience these days, but I don't think it's mature adults.
I wrote a good chunk of the back end of what is now a widely referenced Standard & Poor Global Mineral Intelligence GIS database that draws together and cross references all global mineral leases and company data publicly filed in land offices and stock exchanges across the planet (and a few more odds and sods that take a bit more effort to unearth).
I don't do "enthusiam" .. just the bald facts.
Disney, like many other media and streaming companies in several countries, saw a COVID period boom in stock prices as more people watched media and more investors bet on streaming.
That peaked and passed, falling back to pre COVID levels in the majority of cases.
I dare say some day trading investors fumed and cursed culture wars attributing some facet of "woke" to what was a wide spread an thoroughly predictable occurrence echoed across multiple countries.
In the same time period Disney halved, the major indexes have retained value or increased. It's difficult to benchmark as competitors embraced the same ideologies. All we can say for sure is that against the market, they performed badly.
ok I'll bite, because I must be missing the bus in the last 10 years. Please do tell what propagandas, as in topics, or ideas, Netflix and Disney are pushing and so was Vice? Thanks.
Hehe, are you sure, you want to be filled in on the latest dystopian woke terrorism?
It is the usual. They propagate homosexuality, gender identity, feminism. All the bad stuff. Probably also propagation of witchcraft, if you ask more religious opponents.
(Seriously, considering Disney as progressive, is very weird in my opinion.
And I think the person you replied to, did not actually think Disney is doing Propaganda, it was a mocking statement to the initial post)
I see. So remakes with women, gay people having roles in TV etc. I guess if you're a religious zealot that would hurt. I miss the days where you had to be intelligent to be on the internet. Sorry, but social media royally fucked up humanity into a polarised war of opinions.
" Sorry, but social media royally fucked up humanity into a polarised war of opinions."
I rather think it made those polarised opinions more visible.
The divide existed before, extremists on all sides just had less broad interaction. Now they read each other on the internet and can directly jump on each others throat. And with less restraint, than in real life, as all semi anonymous.
I'm sorry but they do get it done, just look at your mother. It's silly to silo roles based on sex. Embrace the differences, you'll live a much happier life, rather than being sold the idea of segregation based on anything. Segregation sells clicks, it sells views, it sells ideas.
As for entertainment, it's entertainment. If you're referring to women remakes of films, it's not my cup of tea either, it doesn't mean that it's bad entertainment and the other half of the planet can enjoy it.
That is part of the problem. That some people believe that getting laid and following through with the consequences is actually an acomplishment. It is not, it is how nature works. Once that is done, the work actually starts, and it starts to become relevant what sort of human you are. How much you know, frankly, how intelligent you are.
Besides, since you seem to love to trigger me with just the "right" sentences:
Would you rather her have not done this for you?
Yes, now that you ask, I would have prefered if she didn't do that. Why that is is a bit too complicated to pack into a single reply. Just dont assume that your way of seeing things works for others.
Do you think, giving birth is easier, than just taking a pill?
For men it is easy to "make babies". For women it isn't. They usually sacrifice at least a year for it. You aren't really productive, if your brain is a hormon slurry and everything hurts. And most women do get lasting injuries from the birth, taking years to recover. (have you ever sacrifized a year for someone else?)
So it seems, she tried at least. And then maybe discovered that she does not have anything more for you. Or not much.
That is shitty and not fair. No doubt and sorry to hear that.
But that is also how nature works. There is no fairness baked in anywhere. In the end life is a gift.
You can take it, or don't.
But if you continiue to choose life, you maybe would be better off, if one day you can let go of your anger over your childhood trauma of abandonment.
Sometimes things can work out with the old family. Sometimes not, but the world is full of people looking for a real family.
But a family can only work, if the partners respect and trust each other. And sorry if I am crossing a line again (I was aware with my question before, what your answer likely would be), but I think you would have a major struggle with that, with the fear of being abandoned again, this time by your partner. Which can easily lead to jealousy, pressure, all the usual stuff, breaking up and a new generation of half or full abandoned children.
And you might have sworn to yourself, that you would never abandon your children - but when you are done, you are done. I never thought I could get there, but I was close to that point with my children. Kids and everything around it, is undescribable intense, unless everything was set up perfectly before. And I am not aware of many such cases.
Your mother was a human. Faulty, with limited energy, understanding and naivity. Likely experienced her childhood traumatas.
She tried and failed - partly. Because you are alive and can choose now, what you do in this imperfect world of ours.
And going back to the original point, maybe, only maybe, if your mother as a child would have heard more often "girls can do it", instead of "you are just a girl", she would have been able to do it the whole way through.
Nope. I am against the woke trope that "everything is better done by a women". Absoulte statements like this and the one you tried to imply are always wrong.
You do understand that riling up right-wing nutjobs is a deliberate marketing strategy?
Imagine you're a production company working on a low-budget docudrama for Netflix where you know it will be displayed as just one more UI tile among an endless tsunami of similar low-budget dramas from around the world. Which marketing approach do you think would work better:
1) Make a historically accurate show with the little money you have, release it, and watch it sink to oblivion with a slightly below average rating;
2) Add a provocative bait that you know the most bored unemployed crowd on Twitter won't be able to resist; watch everybody talk about your show; enjoy your 11% rating because it came with massive online notoriety and a fat Netflix royalty wire for a few months.
There obviously are enough of them because we've heard of this Cleopatra docudrama when normally this kind of production would have vanished without a trace.
Disney is very much not doing fine. They just replaced their CEO for a reason and they've had a long string of flops, as well as having trashed the Star Wars franchise.
It amazes me that any major organisation believes pitching themselves at a minority group of deniers of the commonly-held views of everyone else - that most people therefore find abrasive and alienating - makes good business sense.
So you think the minorities don't deserve news outlets and opinion platforms? I've been through that already and it was behind the iron curtain, welcome back to the old world - I definitely didn't expect it to be called "good".
No. Minorities do not deserve carte blanche control of the output of mass communication. That's the most basic enabler of authoritarian dictatorship. Under democratic capitalism, power must cater to the majority, or lose it/go broke.
It's not a perfect system, and remains susceptible to corruption from extremism, but it's historically superior to anything else that's been tried. Presumably this is a reality you've since enjoyed.
Key - for minorities as much as anyone else - is ensuring principles of free speech are upheld. The "woke" crowd have generally promoted censorship ("cancelling"), and therefore are incompatible with protecting their own rights.
Sorry for nitpicking, but you said "The 'woke' crowd have generally promoted censorship ('cancelling')" - but from what I can tell it's not the woke crowd banning books from schools and libraries, banning certain words from education, banning health measures, and I could go on. You talk about wokes promoting things, yet ignore the others actually _implementing_ bans as we speak? Is this gaslighting or what...
To use an analogy: there's a world of difference between scams, spam, opt-in marketing, and an actual, legitimate, invited, email message.
Those not wishing to face the difficult and nuanced reality of these debates equate these in appeals to emotions rather than citing specificity. Not interested in any discussion that employs that technique.
What books? Why? What "health" measures? Why? What were the arguments for and against? Side-stepping these questions is side-stepping the process correct outcomes depend on.
> A 6th grader should NOT, under any circumstances, be taught how to give a blow job by a 400lb man in a dress.
Can you show one instance of this actually happening? I'm not aware of any and what does get banned seems to be a pretty far cry from that sort of thing. Honestly, this registers as more of a pretext than a legitimate concern.
Do you have any examples of this book actually being read to children? Otherwise it's still speculation that kids are being taught "how to give blowjobs". I have no doubt that sexually explicit books on lgbt issues exist, but the claim is that they are being targeted at children.
Do you honestly think a book with a blowjob in it would have been banned if it weren't?
Regardless, exactly which "books" presenters with names such as "Eric Big Clit", "Flowjob" and "rainbow dildo butt monkey" choose to present to children - as young as four - strikes me as somewhat beside the point:
Um. Yes? Considering books like this https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/27/us/tennessee-school-board-rem... have also been banned, I'm not super confident in the some people's ability to distinguish between genuine overstepping of boundaries and stuff they just don't agree with.
Thanks for those links BTW. Those events over in Europe do appear to be of real concern. But, given the nature of the source, it's hard to tell how representative they are.
The county boards statement on that removal seemed pretty reasonable to me:
The McMinn County Board of Education voted to remove the graphic novel Maus from McMinn County Schools because of its unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its depiction of violence and suicide. Taken as a whole, the Board felt this work was simply too adult-oriented for use in our schools.
We do not diminish the value of Maus as an impactful and meaningful piece of literature, nor do we dispute the importance of teaching our children the historical and moral lessons and realities of the Holocaust. To the contrary, we have asked our administrators to find other works that accomplish the same educational goals in a more age-appropriate fashion. The atrocities of the Holocaust were shameful beyond description, and we all have an obligation to ensure that younger generations learn of its horrors to ensure that such an event is never repeated.
Though I would very much agree that censorship of any kind is a delicate matter and can easily become heavy-handed in exactly the way you describe.
I actually don't know anything about that source. It came
up in a search and appeared to summarise and provide source-links to cases I'd previously seen. It wasn't as sensationalist as others so seemed worth including.
Glad you appreciated it. I wasn't able to find something that specifically summarised what I've seen from the US, but it is out there and was as concerning. Maybe it's a bit "boy who cried wolf" with the right in the US on this.
That is, while there's often puritanical hyperbole that's easier for left to switch off to, the right appear to have a valid point most people either side would agree to here, but it's maybe not represented well in mainstream left media.
Good riddance.