Vice files for Bankruptcy

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-15/vice-files-for-chapter-11-in-shift-of-fortune-for-media-upstart

by 7ero • 3 years ago

194 98 3 years ago

bloomberg.com

red_trumpet• 3 years ago

https://archive.ph/7kJ9H

shp0ngle• 3 years ago

Vice is... well, Vice.

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)

bitxbitxbitcoin• 3 years ago

Hope Joseph Cox lands somewhere even more impactful.

hutzlibu• 3 years ago

Do people consider this as a great loss?

I did not liked the sensationalistic format very much, so I avoided them, but they seemed to have done some investigative journalism?

altacc• 3 years ago

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.

lannisterstark• 3 years ago

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.

nsonha• 3 years ago

Twitter for one is net negative to society, at it does is making it extremely hard for people to actually discuss anything.

elorant• 3 years ago

I liked their motherboard columns. Very informative and well presented.

pmoriarty• 3 years ago

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.

usrusr• 3 years ago

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.

bearmode2• 3 years ago

They did indeed do a lot of very real journalism. Something most outlets just don't do anymore. It's a huge shame.

ftrobro• 3 years ago

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.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/mg9vvn/how-our-likes-helped-...

makomk• 3 years ago

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.

junon• 3 years ago

Vice used to have a lot of really great reporting. To see what it's become now is saddening to me.

samwillis• 3 years ago

Other longer thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35944376

lrpe• 3 years ago

I remember how cool their stuff was ~10 years ago.

Won't miss what they became.

ghosty141• 3 years ago

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…

InitialLastName• 3 years ago

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.

sorokod• 3 years ago

Some of their reports were remarkable, for example "The Cannibal Warlords of Liberia" [1] - that takes courage.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRuSS0iiFyo

smcl• 3 years ago

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.

danpalmer• 3 years ago

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.

user_named• 3 years ago

No it's not. Vice had already been around for 15 years at that point.

vanyamarka• 3 years ago

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.

pessimizer3• 3 years ago

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.

IIAOPSW• 3 years ago

or, watching that lanky white boy go deep into the Amazon chasing a frog to get high.

chmod7753• 3 years ago

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.

Good riddance.

fredgrott• 3 years ago

What happen is that they took market money which means they no longer had to be hungry and do good and honest journalism.

throw_m239339• 3 years ago

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.

caseyross• 3 years ago

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.

gspencley2• 3 years ago

Given they are declaring bankruptcy, there seems to be a signal indicating the possibility that no one was willing to pay for the alternative either.

criddell2• 3 years ago

Some years ago they had a large audience

Were the numbers good though? Was it sustainable?

chmod7753• 3 years ago

Not long ago things were looking great:

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/...

yawboakye• 3 years ago

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.

booleandilemma• 3 years ago

The core problem is that people don't want to pay for news.

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.

groestl• 3 years ago

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)

mysterydip2• 3 years ago

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.

NoMoreNicksLeft• 3 years ago

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".

runjake• 3 years ago

I want to pay for news, but:

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.

tensor• 3 years ago

I don't mind paying for news, but I don't want fucking ads if I'm paying.

dzonga• 3 years ago

I paid for the news before i.e NYT.

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.

ekianjo• 3 years ago

paywalls are the worst implementation possible

_Algernon_• 3 years ago

Why would I want to pay for "news" when 90% of the "news" I would be paying for is still produced for the click incentivized business model?

erik_seaberg• 3 years ago

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.

jasmer• 3 years ago

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.

tyingq• 3 years ago

had a large audience, me included

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

okdood64• 3 years ago

I think they've been doing more than fine work recently. Look specifically at their VICE News page:

https://www.youtube.com/@VICENews/videos

GaryNumanVevo• 3 years ago

I think you might be confusing "Vice" and "Vice News" the former did the off-beat stories and the latter was sending correspondents to war zones, etc.

alephnerd• 3 years ago

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.

bearmode2• 3 years ago

God what a shame, they put out some really damn good journalism.

unixhero• 3 years ago

No more Better Man episodes :(

nubinetwork• 3 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35944376

trollied• 3 years ago

I liked some of their output. Hamilton's Pharmacopeia is an amazing show, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton%27s_Pharmacopeia

fergie• 3 years ago

Its easy to take the piss out of Vice, but the world would be a much poorer and less informed place without it.

oger2• 3 years ago

Remember what they did to Naomi Wu (aka. SexyCyborg / https://www.youtube.com/@Naomi-Wu).

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...

poppytaker2• 3 years ago

What a weird plug for Naomi, who for the most part is represented by her partner Timaz. Don't forget they (Naomi and timaz) tried to metoo Ltt.

The journalist you are referring to now works at the verge, fyi

oger2• 3 years ago

It’s from the time when she was truly annoyed by this episode.

pimlottc• 3 years ago

That's a long read, can you provide a summary? I've never heard about this.

phreack• 3 years ago

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.

berjin• 3 years ago

Whenever I think of Vice I think of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia7fUQXskvA

plantain• 3 years ago

Really sad about this. Vice went places no one else would go, and did deep dives on topics (drugs) conventional media wouldn't touch.

local_crmdgeon• 3 years ago

Anyone want to try to buy it with me? Might be fun.

alphabettsy• 3 years ago

Makes me sad. I love their content.

kingsloi• 3 years ago

Bummer, I haven't watched much of their more recent stuff, but I absolutely loved their "The Last Week of High School in Gary, Indiana" episode/story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Plqd8APvln0

karaterobot• 3 years ago

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.

pessimizer3• 3 years ago

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.

sdwr• 3 years ago

Username what it says on the tin!

meindnoch• 3 years ago

creeps and ex-generals

You mean spooks and ex-generals?

ETH_start• 3 years ago

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.

truculent• 3 years ago

Per Wikipedia, Vice started its digital operations in 2006/07. So “only” 8 years is about half of that time

Vice files for Bankruptcy

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