111–120 of 173 posts
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)
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
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Can you show one instance of this actually happening? I'm not aware of any and what does get banned seems to be a pretty far cry from that sort of thing. Honestly, this registers as more of a pretext than a legitimate concern.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It seems like we're living in the era of the 'Netflix Paradox' - the more our content gets decentralized - the more subscriptions we're expected to manage on our credit cards - but, unlike Netflix, there's no 'one size fits all' for news for most people.
A gaming would've been a good example - there's Steam and there's everything else, but is this the case for video streaming? One either shells out a noticeable sum for Netflix/Hulu/Disney+/ESPN+/HBO Max/Amazon Prime Video/Apple TV+/Paramount+/Peacock/... combo (with a number of those free on some year-long promotion), or, I've heard, as the those year-long trials come to end, fragmentation progresses, and diversity and quality of media on any single individual platform declines, people are simply starting to sail back to the high seas.
Maybe if this stream dies (and companies stop blaming it on password sharing or whatever, but realize no one is paying because it's not worth it anymore) there will be some partnerships and larger package deals. But I'm skeptical, as no one had solved how to slice the pie. Microtransactions were proposed to solve this but any attempts at those had ultimately failed.
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.
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.
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.
I remember how cool their stuff was ~10 years ago. Won't miss what they became.
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…
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.