Whenever I think of Vice I think of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia7fUQXskvA
Vice files for Bankruptcy
71–80 of 173 posts
Re: Vice files for Bankruptcy
#72Some 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.
> Some years ago they had a large audience
Were the numbers good though? Was it sustainable?
Re: Vice files for Bankruptcy
#73Really sad about this. Vice went places no one else would go, and did deep dives on topics (drugs) conventional media wouldn't touch.
Re: Vice files for Bankruptcy
#74Do 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?
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-...
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.
Re: Vice files for Bankruptcy
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not sure if I understand you right, but are you saying girls are in general less competent?
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.
That's why I asked. (even though your other reply to
keyle, implys otherwise)
And actually, I have not really seen that trope very much: "everything is better done by a women"
It surely exists somewhere, but can you give examples for this with any major production?
Re: Vice files for Bankruptcy
#76Some 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.
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.
Re: Vice files for Bankruptcy
#77Remember 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...
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
Re: Vice files for Bankruptcy
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 si…
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...
Re: Vice files for Bankruptcy
#79Some 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.
> Some years ago they had a large audience Were the numbers good though? Was it sustainable?
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/...
Re: Vice files for Bankruptcy
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 si…
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.
Why would someone want to do that?