Isn't it more likely to be the case that no one was willing to pay for the investigative journalism?

You see this everywhere. The clickbait is a funding source for the real work. Journalists almost never want to push garbage on the public --- they're usually forced to by management, either as an attempt at growth-at-all-costs or as a revenue source of last resort.

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.

What happen is that they took market money which means they no longer had to be hungry and do good and honest journalism.

I think you might be confusing "Vice" and "Vice News" the former did the off-beat stories and the latter was sending correspondents to war zones, etc.

They started edgy (Gavin McInnes was the co-founder), they became partisan. I'm no fan of a certain Youtuber, but he started at Vice News, and he claims that when the sex harassment lawsuits happened, Vice had to make themselves look "clean" for investors and so become more "aligned" with the US political left and became essentially yet another PAC like Vox media or Buzzfeed.

> Some years ago they had a large audience

Were the numbers good though? Was it sustainable?

>had a large audience, me included

I'm also disappointed at the drop in quality. Their reporting from war zones like Syria was really interesting and different.

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.

I think they've been doing more than fine work recently. Look specifically at their VICE News page:

https://www.youtube.com/@VICENews/videos

It was not quite journalism because they didn’t really adhere to standards though they did dig into issues msm is too lazy or narrow to cover and so I think they had a legit voice.

There's an interesting confrontation over that piece in the NY Times 'Page Six' documentary, which filmed David Carr, the Times's then media correspondent, interviewing the Vice Founders: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLmkec_4Rfo

I think part of the Vice pitch was always that it was a disruptor of the old-fashioned media narratives, uncovering the stories to which boring old media was blind. I tend to agree with Carr's implicit critique here that we undervalue the journalistic, societal value of the sort of unglamorous coverage in which traditional media invests and at which it excels.

Oh man this is from the really early days. It's where most of us learned of the bizarrely named Liberian fighter "General Butt Naked" for the first time.

or, watching that lanky white boy go deep into the Amazon chasing a frog to get high.

Hope Joseph Cox lands somewhere even more impactful.

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…

Vice's quality went down almost immediately, so there was no breech to fill. Certainly not a breach in independent media, because Vice was invested in by the same array of creeps and ex-generals as everyone else; they were an attempt to sell empire to the hipster children of rich suburbanites who moved to New York for graduate school.

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.

Per Wikipedia, Vice started its digital operations in 2006/07. So “only” 8 years is about half of that time

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

That's a long read, can you provide a summary? I've never heard about this.

>Almost every closure of a real news outlet is a loss to society

(X)

Only if they are good outlets. The loss of Gawkers was absolutely a net positive to society for example. Vice used to be absurdly good, mind you, but that was 10-15 years ago at best. There may not be that much of a loss here either, like Gawker.

On the other hand, if stuff like AP, Reuters, or CS Monitor closed down, THAT would be an actual loss. Those people actually still do good investigative journalism now and then.

Twitter for one is net negative to society, at it does is making it extremely hard for people to actually discuss anything.

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.