Why BuzzFeed and Vice Couldn’t Make News Work

Why BuzzFeed and Vice Couldn’t Make News Work(vanityfair.com)

5 points by baylearn 3 years ago | 7 comments

Not sure about Vice, but for me BuzzFeed for news is like talking to Stormy Daniels about virginity. If that's what you're doing, you're confused.

There's already an over abundancy of half-assed "news" sources (many them inspired by the BF f-integrity-make-it-viral model).

"I'm upset BF News has tanked," said no one ever.

warrenm 3 years ago |

I think the answer is much simpler:

- they basically started as listicle sites

- pivoting from silliness to "seriousness" is hard ... and when 'everyone thinks you're a joke' ... they're going to continue to treat you like a joke

that ... and they weren't very discriminating as to who/what they allowed to advertise

dagw 3 years ago | |

I agree that this is true for BuzzFeed, but it doesn't really ring true for Vice. Vice started off by doing some fairly serious and gonzo reporting on stories no one else was interested in. This got them noticed and some of it got at least begrudgingly taken seriously by more serious journalists. Say what you want, but Vice won real awards for their reporting. Then they more or less gave up on all of that and put all their energy into running a listicle site.

Mistletoe 3 years ago | |

I think it’s even more simple than that. They, like so many other things, were a zero interest rate phenomenon.

https://independentspeculator.com/tech-privilege-a-zero-inte...

warrenm 3 years ago | | |

nice double entendre on "zero interest" :)

fullshark 3 years ago |

Because they produce digital content, and content is getting commoditized, competing with everything from other news sites, blogposts, message board posts, youtube videos, soon LLM output, you don't want to be in the digital content business.

Owning a digital content platform however...

johnny99k 3 years ago |

They went from dangerous, interesting, and rebellious to the status quo. Which slowly destroyed their competitive advantage. Why would I read Vice when there are 100 other news sites with almost the same content?