Vice Media: A Company Built on a Bluff
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Re: Vice Media: A Company Built on a Bluff
#2The key point in the article is that the Vice we see today really didn't start until 2010, and it has nothing much to do with Vice magazine that existed in the late 90s and early 2000s..
Re: Vice Media: A Company Built on a Bluff
#3Being one of the few pre-Internet media companies to still be around in some form today, their story is pretty fascinating. It clearly hasn't worked out for the better though. Vice on HBO, while covering a massive breadth of topics, suffer from their presentation; their nasally-voiced mid 20s employees they send on documentaries are mostly boredom-inducing, and their various online news outlets are Buzzfeed-tier clickbait with the occasional well-researched piece.
Re: Vice Media: A Company Built on a Bluff
#4That is well plastic. Peace and fuckin'.
Re: Vice Media: A Company Built on a Bluff
#5Being one of the few pre-Internet media companies to still be around in some form today, their story is pretty fascinating. It clearly hasn't worked out for the better though. Vice on HBO, while covering a massive breadth of topics, suffer from their presentation; their nasally-voiced mid 20s employees they send on documentaries are mostly boredom-inducing, and their various online news outlets are Buzzfeed-tier clic…
IFC's documentary parody series Documentary Now! (https://www.ifc.com/shows/documentary-now) did a great episode in its first season called "DRONEZ: The Hunt for El Chingon" that is an hilarious, pitch-perfect sendup of the Vice documentary style. It's on Netflix, if memory serves.
Re: Vice Media: A Company Built on a Bluff
#6Being one of the few pre-Internet media companies to still be around in some form today, their story is pretty fascinating. It clearly hasn't worked out for the better though. Vice on HBO, while covering a massive breadth of topics, suffer from their presentation; their nasally-voiced mid 20s employees they send on documentaries are mostly boredom-inducing, and their various online news outlets are Buzzfeed-tier clic…
IFC's documentary parody series Documentary Now! ( https://www.ifc.com/shows/documentary-now ) did a great episode in its first season called "DRONEZ: The Hunt for El Chingon" that is an hilarious, pitch-perfect sendup of the Vice documentary style. It's on Netflix, if memory serves.
I think that captures the zeitgeist really well. Vice is now just a pale imitation of what used to be true cultural 'edginess'.
Re: Vice Media: A Company Built on a Bluff
#7They seem to have originally tried to make themselves in the mold of National Lampoon, but someone that actually read the magazine in the 90s could probably comment more on this. I was busy having kids and raising a family, so I didn't get much of a chance to read such content.
Along those lines: if you get a chance, check out "Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead" on Netflix. I was too young and missed the best parts of National Lampoon, watching the later 80s movies mostly and never reading the magazine, but images like "I Survived the Attack of the Krazed Kent Kamikaze Kids" are sheer brilliance.
Re: Vice Media: A Company Built on a Bluff
#8They seem to have originally tried to make themselves in the mold of National Lampoon, but someone that actually read the magazine in the 90s could probably comment more on this. I was busy having kids and raising a family, so I didn't get much of a chance to read such content. Along those lines: if you get a chance, check out "Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead" on Netflix. I was too young and missed the best parts of Nati…
A closer historical analogue to what Vice has tried to do is probably Rolling Stone. Today Rolling Stone is utterly dispensable, so it can be hard to imagine; but in the '70s it was what Vice so desperately wants to be today, a sort of journal-of-record for youth culture. If you wanted to know where the edge was, Rolling Stone had writers like Lester Bangs and Hunter S. Thompson who could show you.
Re: Vice Media: A Company Built on a Bluff
#9The company culture sounds absolutely toxic, and the leadership team sounds both ill prepared and unethical.
Re: Vice Media: A Company Built on a Bluff
#10Wow did the writer get fired from Vice?
I thought all of this was pretty normal for companies starting to grow.
Yeah sales/marketing always is scummy, but its 2018, do you think FB says I'm an 'active user' despite me only going on it 1 time a month? You bet.