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Vice is said to be headed for bankruptcy
- mensetmanusman 3y agoNews dies with the internet. Who would pay for news when you can get news for free on the internet. Soon it will just be billionaires feeding us what we want to know.
- rvz 3y agoVice was on its way out anyway and the world could do without such a clickbait-laden pseudo-news site down the trash bin. Good riddance and nothing of value was lost.
- rileymat2 3y agoI enjoyed the specials and daily shows they had on HBO years ago.
- tempaccount3333 3y ago[flagged]
- nemothekid 3y agoGavin left Vice in 2008
- 90-00-09 3y agoBy this logic if you watch Star Wars you are a racist because Walt Disney was (apparently) racist.
- UncleEntity 3y agoBut that is the logic. Just like donations of Dr Seuss books is a racist act because he did WWII propaganda work for the government.
- snapetom 3y agoDark Side of the Ring was freakin' awesome. At least they had the foresight to run away with that. But every freakin' promo about something marijuana related was tiresome.
- arprocter 3y agoThat weekly show which seemed to mostly consist of dumping journos into extremely sketchy situations was pretty wild I thought it got cancelled long ago, but apparently it got moved to Showtime? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice_(TV_series)
- jheitmann 3y agoWaypoint was lost. Good gaming media is like a big water droplet that keeps on getting smushed by a the big dumb thumb of capitalism. It still shifts to a new spot, but ever diminishing. One of the rare ones that even made money. Still, gone.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- testfrequency 3y agoGood, I hope they fail. Lazy clickbait reporting and shock value editing. Long history of screwing over their most well known journalists also. Above all, the Co-founder of Vice is Proud Boy..good riddance
- 90-00-09 3y agoThey had great news reporting and incredible deep dive series (reporting from war-torn territories). Gavin, one of the founders, was not a Proud Boy when he founded Vice. Then became a Proud Boy when he was not contributing to Vice.
- hammyhavoc 3y agoImagine celebrating the losses of both job positions and jobs themselves in this market.
- Laaas 3y agoI have enjoyed many VICE videos on YouTube. Unfortunate.
- abracadaniel 3y agoProbably a good time to back up any you care about. Whatever entity buys the rights could take them down
- kordlessagain 3y agoMost of these types of outlets are doomed by the dawn of language models, but it’s all our jobs that they keep saying are at risk.
- yreg 3y agoPrimary sources (like on the ground war reporting) are not replaceable by LLMs.
- coldtea 3y agoIf LLMs reduce the "middle class able to support news websites via its ad spending" enough, sending these people in despair and/or lower paying jobs, they willl indirectly remove the support for such reporting anyway.
- yamtaddle 3y agoLocal reporting is the most important, as far as what people reading/seeing/hearing it can meaningfully act on, and it's already all but dead thanks to the Internet and smartphones making competition for attention a global enterprise 24/7/365 no matter where a person is.
- smt88 3y agoIf no one can tell the difference, how would we know?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- yreg 3y agoThe honest AI-only papers will admit they are not the primary source on the ground. As for the dishonest ones, it's not a new problem (only the scale will be new), since fake news are widespread already. The society combats it by a reputation system. I take a BBC war correspondent seriously, but a random military-blogger I never heard of I take less seriously.
- dantheman 3y agoI always think of The Onion's Edge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWVNDfDSE44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWVNDfDSE44
- snapetom 3y ago[flagged]
- bitL 3y agoVice used to be pretty innovative in the beginning, then something snapped and they ended up bland.
- themagician 3y agoIt's just the people. They were able to find some truly amazing journalists. Isobel Yeung has put herself into truly insanely dangerous situations to get a unique story time and time again.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- stevev 3y agoI agree. Some of the contents were amazing. Especially for a media company, try and keep those winners.
- reducesuffering 3y agoYep. Vice just released an interview with Isobel in Moscow harshly questioning the Ukrainian child deportation Russian wanted by the International Criminal Court.
- themagician 3y agoI do not understand how she is still alive. IMO she may be the most interesting person alive. Not even hyperbole. With all the places she's been and things she's seen… I can't even imagine. I'm amazed how calm and collected she always seems to be.
- permo-w 3y agothere are only so many times you can write “We Meet [recreational drug] [dealers/takers/producers] in [exotic country]” before people lose interest
- konfusinomicon 3y ago
- kome 3y agoend of an era; they used to be very good. but they completely disappeared from my radar in the last years.
- partiallypro 3y agoI still really like Vice News, but they do a lot less investigative pieces that are on the ground. Their reporting on Ukraine in 2014/15, Syria and even North Korea were top notch. I hope at least the News portion is bought up by Axios or someone. Vice itself, I could do without. It hasn't been relevant in a long time and is mostly just living on rage clicks. Like BuzzFeed, it felt like just adding "News" to a brand that largely wasn't actually "News" was a mistake. You'd got to vice.com and it would be a heap of trash, but go to "vicenews.com" (now just redirects to a section of Vice) and you'll get much better content. For instance, on vicenews.com now you see "Ukraine Is Now Using Steam Decks to Control Machine Gun Turrets" which is interesting...then on vice.com you have "Ring In #MasturbationMay With MysteryVibe's Massive Sex Toy Sale"...what is this mix? Why did they do this? vice.com is also full of stoner content, it's wild.
- reminder_plus 3y ago[flagged]
- redwood 3y agoI can't shake the association with their founder that went off the deep end
- wpietri 3y agoAnd for those wondering, that's Gavin McInnes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_McInnes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_McInnes Who among other things founded the Proud Boys. The same Proud Boys now on trial for seditious conspiracy to violently overthrow the lawful government of these United States: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/seditious-conspiracy-trial-against-proud-boys-members-in-hands-of-jury https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/seditious-conspiracy-trial...
- s1mon 3y agoFFS, how did I miss this? Considering how counter culture Vice was early on it felt quite left wing. Does every fringe political thing wrap around? In other words if you move super far to the left, do you end up wrapping back around on the right wing? Is the connection libertarian or authoritarian, anarchist, fascist or what?
- tehjoker 3y agoNope, Vice media is a capitalist corporation, so no it was never left wing. It makes sense that an edgy founder of a capitalist corp. could go far to the right, as that is acceptably within the system that preserves private wealth. Perhaps by left wing you meant liberal. There are some (very few) examples of rich people that became class traitors, Engels was one, but usually they have some distance (e.g. via inheritance, as with Engels) from how the money was made.
- zmgsabst 3y agoMaybe “left versus right” is too simplistic of a mental model and we obscure important information about political beliefs trying to shoehorn everything into a single, arbitrary dimension?
- hackermatic 3y agoVice Motherboard has been a really good check on the tech industry. A lot of the rest of Vice has always been trashy and exploitative, but it's had an unexpectedly big impact, as well -- much like BuzzFeed News.
- c-hendricks 3y agoWhat was exploitive about Waypoint?
- nailer 3y agoWaypoint journalists (along with many other mainstream games journalists) falsely accused Palmer Luckey of being a nazi https://www.uploadvr.com/fake-news-happens-reporting-palmer-luckey-nimble-america/ https://www.uploadvr.com/fake-news-happens-reporting-palmer-...
- c-hendricks 3y agoRight, he's just one of the other ten people sitting at a table with a nazi.
- nailer 3y agoWho is the nazi (and what's the picture)?
- minhazm 3y ago[flagged]
- smt88 3y agoThis article is about Vice, not The Verge.
- minhazm 3y agoThe Verge is a Vice publication. It’s the same company. If Vice goes bankrupt so does The Verge and to be frank I think more people on HN are familiar with The Verge than they are Vice.
- smt88 3y ago> The Verge is a Vice publication. It’s the same company. No, it isn't. The Verge is owned by Vox, not Vice. Vox is an independent private company. It's not hard to spend 3 seconds Googling things before ranting about them.
- wpietri 3y agoI think you're confusing "bias" and "viewpoint". A bias would imply that they were irrationally negative about Elon for something outside of his control. E.g., maybe they didn't like people with E names, so they were also mean about Emilio Estevez. But I think at this point Musk has enough of a track record that people can be rationally negative about him. No journalist is obliged to obliterate their memory each day. They're allowed to remember what he's done in the past and interpret new events in light of that. Indeed, keeping better track than their readers and using that knowledge to inform is basically their job.
- MangoCoffee 3y agoi used to like Vice. its series on Russia's "Green men" taking over Crimea was excellent. Vice went downhill after 2014
- vlozko 3y agoYes, it was some of the best reporting in the conflict by Simon Ostrovsky who’s now at PBS (https://www.simonostrovsky.com/ https://www.simonostrovsky.com/). His material and access to people from both sides of the conflict was without equal.
- rasz 3y agoNow they run errands for war criminals https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7bdva/maria-lvova-belova-interview https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7bdva/maria-lvova-belova-in...
- reducesuffering 3y agoHow are they running errands? In that interview, Isobel is right up to the line of the questions and tone a journalist in Moscow is able to ask without ending up in prison. And despite Maria preparing for it, the interview further illuminates the truth that Maria is full of shit, coming off terrible and deflecting.
- rasz 3y agohttps://twitter.com/BadBalticTakes/status/1653314587649884163 https://twitter.com/BadBalticTakes/status/165331458764988416... - original article called Crimea russian territory - softball questions - letting war criminal spew propaganda - questioning if any crime happened at all
- skinnymuch 3y agoYeah Crimea isn’t Russian territory. Thank you for understanding why imperialism and colonialism is wrong. It’s so annoying when Global North people think occupied stolen land is fine!! Some people still to this day believe Hawaii and Puerto Rico and every other territory the US holds is American territory like Crimea is Russian. Thank you so much for understanding the point isn’t to single out Russia. It’s to see how the entire Global North thrives by less violently colonizing and stealing resources, people, and territory from the rest of the world.
- Exuma 3y ago[flagged]
- kkirsche 3y agoI really loved Vice Games, aka Waypoint. The team over there really gave it their all and it showed. Sad to see this happen
- EngManagerIsMe 3y agoThey all got laid off. Waypoint is no more.
- permo-w 3y agoVice had (has?) a very interesting monetisation model, which didn’t rely on typical advertising or subscriptions they essentially conjured an image of “coolness” to the end of selling sponsorships to megacorps. so they’d go and sneak into North Korea or meet a transgender Ecuadorean meth dealer and it’d be sponsored for a shocking amount of money by—say—Microsoft or Heineken thinking that cool millennials would hop on board quite innovative for journalism as far as I know, but I suspect the return on investment was pretty poor
- George83728 3y agoWhen they lost their quirky uniqueness, they lost their relevance. What's the difference between Vice today and Salon, Huffpo, etc? They become one of an interchangeable crowd. I think Vice peaked around the time they put out This Is What Winning Looks Like. I haven't seen any media from Vice as compelling as that since then.
- themagician 3y agoI would not equate the two. Salon and Huffpo were just clickbait farms, almost from Day 1. They had some interesting pieces from time to time, but nothing I ever thought of as particularly unique. Vice produced (and still does some times) some incredible pieces because they were able to get access to people who were otherwise inaccessible… or it required a level or risk that is simply unacceptable. I just came back to this thread because there’s an interview that just got posted a few hours ago with Maria Lvova-Belova IN Russia and it’s wild.
- nailer 3y agoFor anyone interested: https://www.vice.com/en/article/gqwajy/this-is-what-winning-looks-like-full-length https://www.vice.com/en/article/gqwajy/this-is-what-winning-...
- EngManagerIsMe 3y agoWaypoint and sometimes Motherboard were incredible. It's sad to see them disappear from the space.
- pengaru 3y agoI was never much of a VICE follower, but their This Is What Winning Looks Like [0] special on the US' war in Afghanistan seemed like pretty solid journalism. Wish they'd continue producing content like that... Hamilton's Pharmacopeia was fun as well. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja5Q75hf6QI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja5Q75hf6QI
- Hammershaft 3y agoVice News (Owned by HBO!) is still incredible!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dopeboy 3y agoSad to see, I remember being hooked to their early work. I’ll occasionally watch Vice News which is still good. On the ground, on or near the front lines of a conflict zone, has always been there sweet spot.
- tjpnz 3y agoTreat your audience like idiots who must be shouted down at and you'll lose that audience fast. And that's a shame because interspersed with all the trendy woke messaging there was actually a lot of good. My favourites were the Scott Dozier death row interview and the "One Star Reviews" series.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 3y agoEh, demagogues do it all the time, talking about how undisciplined people have become, even going as far as saying deliberately offensive things or curse words on national TV, and yet they get popular support all the same. People aren’t necessarily proud. They just have their biases and they would love for a certain type of person or entity to berate them.
- nailer 3y agoI think the era of the TV talking head is over too. More have audiences less than the big podcasts.
- boeingUH60 3y agoPosting a previous comment on a Vice-related article because it’s relevant here; Vice Media has several issues; 1) The founder, Shane Smith, was over ambitious and raised over $1 billion, which is just too much for a media firm. This is not a software business with high margins to justify such capital. 2) Vice transformed from an edgy content company producing cool stuff like a documentary about the Liberian cannibal warlord and a trip to North Korean labor camp and became just another mainstream liberal/left-leaning news outlet; the problem is there’s no shortage of such outlets, so Vice lost what made it unique. The good thing about the kind of edgy content Vice produced is that it cut across all political spectrums and across different countries, meaning a larger audience. Anecdote is I and my friends (from Nigeria) used to watch Vice shows but have stopped due to shoving US politics down our throats. What will likely happen is that Vice will end up selling for scraps. But note that Shane Smith already sold $100 million+ worth of shares [1], so he’ll be fine regardless. 1- https://www.semafor.com/article/03/19/2023/shane-smith-made-more-than-100-million-from-vice https://www.semafor.com/article/03/19/2023/shane-smith-made-...
- davidguetta 3y agoI'm french and I agree 1000 % with this comment. I used to love vice's provocative and borderline offensive articles. The french version had that satiric and extremely spicy "war of classes" vibe some other french publications such as charlie hebo had and it was a delight. (cf this one if you can translate it: https://www.vice.com/fr/article/avbv55/le-guide-vice-pour-pecho-des-filles-de-riches https://www.vice.com/fr/article/avbv55/le-guide-vice-pour-pe...) However for the past 10 years I go see their home page once a year and I physically cringe and how boring / washed up all the articles are. I don't think there is a better example of go woke go broke if the story is true.
- Moneyyyyy 3y ago[flagged]
- voytec 3y ago> raised over $1 billion, which is just too much for a media firm. This is not a software business with high margins to justify such capital. I'll bite. Why is it too much? This sum could be spent on purchasing smaller, struggling media companies covering various niches, or companies unrelated to media, to bootstrap a conglomerate.
- pengaru 3y agoThe last few recent VICE/Vice News clips I've watched on youtube seemed like the visual content was predominately AI-selected stock footage ~loosely related to the words being narrated. Those instances basically were just audio narrations with borderline pointless visuals you may as well just be listening to. The narrator might be talking about a particular invasion of a specific country for instance, and the visuals are just showing some random war footage and you're left wondering if this is even from the present day let alone the right country/invasion etc. It's totally strange. Can't cost very much to produce though...
- reducesuffering 3y agoI don't understand why Vice is hated here so much. Yes, they have dopey "stoner" content, like Buzzfeed did with their vapid original content. But like Buzzfeed, they have been doing serious journalism, getting unique interviews with heads of state, adversaries, and in war zones. Just today, they released this interview in Moscow with the Russian lady wanted by the International Criminal Court for deporting kids from Ukraine: https://youtu.be/Ei4xLdv2gYE https://youtu.be/Ei4xLdv2gYE Among other good ones involving Ukraine, Russia, Taliban, etc. Taliban Rule: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIFi_Rgm-T8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIFi_Rgm-T8 Ukrainian soldiers' lives before the invasion of Ukraine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKAt56zW0-g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKAt56zW0-g Siege of Ukrainian Bakhmut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lpe1OgCbCY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lpe1OgCbCY and the all too crazy bride kidnapping that happens in Kyrgyzstan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKAusMNTNnk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKAusMNTNnk
- HellDunkel 3y agoThanks for sharing these links. I just watched one of them and it is some great reporting. Problem with vice is that they have been mixing serious reporting with trash, jackass plain nonsense. I remember this going on since the first time i encountered the print magazine. It seems as they are just aiming for the crass, no matter if there was substance of not and it ruined them in the end- rightfully so.
- qup 3y agoReminds me of how every time I google a video game tip I wind up reading it on forbes.com of all places
- shp0ngle 3y ago> mixing serious reporting with trash, jackass plain nonsense That has been their modus operandi from almost day one, though. I just think they haven't figured the financing out. These reportings are still quite expensive, they don't want to go subscription-based, and when you look at the view counts, they are not that big really. You cannot finance all that just from YouTube ads, as the money then mosty go to Google.
- mdisc0rd 3y ago[dead]
- rhuru 3y agoVice was good as long as it was edgy. But now a days it is mostly far left progressive trash which you can read on Buzzfeed, NYT and 15 other major outlets.
- mwinatschek 3y agoVice used to be cool around the 2010's. I got the monthly magazine in our local American Apparel store for free and absolutely loved the edgy stories, photos and interviews. But after Shane left, Vice became another boring Buzzfeed clone. It was another example of the sad truth that nothing good lasts forever.
- Ekaros 3y agoIs there at this point money in even modestly expensive investigative journalism? Getting people there, having them spend some time on site with all the work involved, to produce what one piece week or a month? Will that sort of content garner return? While on other side, you can rewrite AP or Reuters. Pick some twitter post. Or just throw stuff at AI... Or sit in relatively cheap office and talk to microphone producing hours of content a day. While people throw money at you and sponsors pay for you selling out...
- majani 3y agoFor the past 6 years, there has been a sustained effort by big tech to push publishers out of business in favor of influencers, so I won't be shocked if a group of "inestigative influencers" fill the gap
- stiltzkin 3y agoSeems looking for good ESG score did not work.