11–20 of 78 posts
Too bad because I used to love Vice documentaries and now I can't stand them at all.
Being 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…
Being 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…
Wow 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.
No, it's not normal at all. It's normal for scam artists and Silicon Valley and used car salesmen. But no, it's now how real businesses start and grow.
Henry Ford, JD Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Walt Disney didn't go around bragging about "doing blow on naked models."
OK, maybe Rockefeller.
Investors should run away as quickly as possible. If that quote from the Chief Revenue Officer isn't a red flag, I don't know what is.
Being 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…
I love what VICE was ~2005-2010. VICE and what it has become today (see: VICELAND) is... nothing what it used to be. I love their documentary style from the 2010 range. The NK documentaries on YouTube were my favorite. They've turned into like you said a buzzfeed-tier garbage.
the quality went downhill and i've stopped following them a few years ago. but back in the day, they were excellent as far as gonzo journalism goes.
Being 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…
Wha?
> When I asked Dominique Delport, the chief revenue officer, whether the company was profitable, he declined to say and suggested that dollar figures were the wrong way to think about Vice. “The company profit is to everybody who watches Vice, because they feel smarter,” he said. Investors should run away as quickly as possible. If that quote from the Chief Revenue Officer isn't a red flag, I don't know what is.
They 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.