Vice used to provide something that other publishers didn't: It put correspondents out in the field, and showed you things that other outlets ignored. "Old Vice

Vice used to provide something that other publishers didn't: It put correspondents out in the field, and showed you things that other outlets ignored. "Old Vice", everybody calls it. It wasn't perfect. Sometimes the kids were clueless. And they had some bad habits, like making the reporters curse gratuitously just to look "authentic". Which then made you wonder how much else was fake, reality-tv stuff. What was happening outside the frame, or when the camera was off? Is this just "news porno"? (Actually, some of that may have been "New Vice" trying to mimic "Old Vice", around the takeover, "hello fellow kids" style.) But sometimes, you got a masterpiece from an experienced reporter, like This is What Winning Looks Like. Or you got a kid who was earnestly trying to be a good reporter, and you found yourself rooting for him. Plus, he was bound to find something in his journeys. In fact, he often did. What was important about it was that it interacted with the world. People went out and recorded things. Then at some point it changed. No longer did hipster acolytes of Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson take cameras abroad. Instead, English majors wrote essays on the Approved Themes from the safety of their offices. Then it became pointless. I understand that the founder flirted with various kinds of politics, including some on the Right. Now, if Vice were to devolve into Murdochian hysterics, then it would be terrible and worthless. But I do think that that political curiosity made it more interesting. I remember they embedded with the Oath Keepers in a somewhat skeptical but largely sympathetic piece, years before that same group got mixed up in Trumpist/Jan-6 shit. It was a perspective that would have been impossible to get from any other outlet. Buzzfeed, on the other hand, was always gossipy crap. Nowadays, you can get a tamer version of some of this from European outlets like DW, or occasionally from Al Jazeera, and somewhat from various semi-anonymous European documentary-makers on YouTube (who occasionally devolve to the worst impulses of a previous generation's National Geographic). But I feel more could easily fit in this niche.