I used to love vice. They had some of the most engaging content covering things I'd never see. But then it all started to unravel when the platform mostly turned into cringey hipster New Yorkers telling me about their preferred way to consume weed 10 times a day.
Well, it literally started as a Montreal hipster magazine. And yes, it fairly early moved to NYC but it was still kind of an indie cultural/hipster magazine for stuff like funny fashion "dos and don'ts" and music and cultural scene stuff. It wasn't really left-political at all. The shift to an American liberal news orientation happened post-9/11, and probably in the context of Occupy Wall St etc.
Some of their early well known content was where to get coke in Brooklyn and how to sleep with a stripper. And in 2006, that was edgy ny hipster content. That was their brand from the absolute beginning. They just happened to also do some good video journalism along the way.
So you just made up a story of fictional version of Vice being taken over by trust fund Millenials (whatever that means) and you didn't realize that the content you hate was present in Vice from start to finish of its lifecycle (and may have even made its actual journalism possible). And then, when called out on it, you pretended you did know that all along.
Yes and what it was successful as was something else again. The trust fund kiddies went away and actually interesting people took over. Then the trust fund kiddies came back and ran it to the ground. Same thing as reddit.
When Vice was just the magazine, it was pretty influential considering it was just, basically, three guys. Gavin McInnes gets a lot of stick these days, but he was pretty instrumental to establishing the baseline "Vice-voice."
It kept its unique voice for a decent amount of time, but it eventually sank into a mode where it was where you went to hear the same things you heard anywhere else, but with a bit more blue language as an affectation of authenticity.
Going from Hipster Mad Magazine to Hipster National Geographic worked for far longer than I would have guessed.
yeah, if you think this is what they have been doing for the past few years, then you haven't really bothered to check out their work. They have been consistently doing some amazing international reporting that none of the mainstream media channels were/are interested in.
It’s not the only thing, but it’s the mostly thing.
Looking at their front page right now, over half the articles are buzzfeed-quality rubbish:
-“America Has Decided That Homeless People Aren't People”
-“5 Experts Tell us What They Think a Healthy Relationship Looks Like”
-“This Week's Coolest Drops, From Hoka to 'Seinfeld' x Percival”
-“Russia Wants to Build a MAGA Colony for US Conservatives, Lawyer Claims”
-“THIS WEEK ONLINE – Who's Afraid of the Proletariat?”
-“I Went to a BDSM Convention With My Ex”
They still have some original reporting, but I stopped going to them years ago because I don’t want to filter through dreck, and certainly aren’t signing up for their updates, in order to watch for decent items.
It does seem like hipster stuff and I don’t understand who would want to consistently read this and who their target market is.
They seem to hire lots of people to write this stuff and are looking to be a “lifestyle news” brand but who wants to be into their nihilistic, negative lifestyle?
Oh, I didn't even think of their website articles because I barely go there. I might be wrong here but when most people think of Vice today, they think of their shows or the content on Youtube. Their news show was consistently doing great original work (some of which they would post on Youtube).
Vice always did clickbait / lifestyle, but they also invested heavily in real hard hitting stories that other outlets ignored. Of course they also continued the clickbait / lifestyle stuff alongside it.
For a while the Real Reporting was surfacing frequently, but not so much these days, even though they're still doing it. For whatever reason, people just don't seem to see / care / value that Real Reporting as much (I have my theories...), and these outlets are struggling.
Well this is what happens when you appeal to the 'Cringey hipster New Yorkers' and alienate your old viewership of showing underground or under-reported investigative journalism before 2012.
Now it seems like the readers have punished Vice when they went down that route in 2012 and all that got them was into bankruptcy much faster than they tried to predict Twitter's collapse.
Given that they chose to do that to themselves, nothing of value was lost. Henceforth:
Vice was started by three Canadian junkies (they literally called themselves that), and for years was only available in print in the hippest neighborhoods of major cities, while printing salacious material that later became published as books like "The Vice Guide to Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll" and "DOs & DON'Ts 2: 17 Years of Street Fashion Critiques". Very little reporting.
Then slowly, over the years, the reporting arm emerged as a force to be reckoned with, but it was for "cringey hipsters" first. The old, OLD readership.
I'd argue it ended around the GFC, so say ~15 years ago.
They did some interesting reporting leading up to the crash, the occupy movement, etc.. and then blanded out for sure.
