I guess. Isn't it usually the case that if a company has sufficient tangible and intangible value and competition between interested bidders, that it gets bought normally; but if its value is substantially less than the total of its assets, debts, equity etc., then the few bidders will wait until a bankruptcy process eliminates a substantial part of the former debt and all the equity to leave a saleable core business, which can only happen in a bankruptcy proceeding anyway.
Something tells me that post-ZIRP we're going to see that happen a lot.
And this is exactly why a sizeable chunk of the world - even here on HN - is cheering their demise. Being different is definitely not generally acceptable.
What do you mean, at this point there are 10+ comments here saying the exact opposite: that their demise is due to them becoming less edgy and more bland, more like everyone else.
Probably as usual, at the time I commented the most comments were the negative ones, and only later the positives started coming. There was even a discussion about this temporal trend not long time ago...
Good retrospective on the inflection point for this cohort of digital media in the generally excellent Odd Lots podcast recently (Search “End of an Era for Digital Media).
Their conclusion on Vice was that it was never in the same league as BuzzFeed or similar in terms of traffic, but had one of the most pure and influential brands in the space.
Vice and Buzzfeed really benefited from their social media strategy back when Facebook newsfeed began to promote more news articles. They were often featured together as the rising stars of digital media.
> [Vice] had one of the most pure and influential brands in the space
I also remember the Intel Vice campaign. Shows that Vice had such a strong appeal that Intel really wanted to reach out to their younger demographics back then.
As many have pointed out, I haven't seen their articles or videos going viral recently. When Shane Smith left, it seems that the voice of counterculture and rebellion disappeared from the editorial leadership.
> Before Vice, Smith went to university in Ottawa, played in local punk bands, and travelled around Eastern Europe before moving to Montreal.
I’m not sure why money would be the measure for whether someone was counter-cultural enough, especially when they made their money through providing something that the mainstream (at the time, certainly) was not.
Maybe it did in the 70s. But anything past that it’s basically the opposite. Punk music is oldies; literally half century old tradition at this point. It’s like calling folk music counter culture.
Ouch. I think there's still plenty of post-70s punk that's counter-culture (see, for example, Leftover Crack), but I think you're right in that "pop punk" definitely dulled the edge of the genre in general.
Smith was born in 1969, and being in a punk band was counter-culture right up to the point in the late 90s when Americans in the mainstream started to reuse the word (when grunge was being replaced) for bands that clearly weren't punk.
Aside from that, what does age have to do with being counter-cultural or not? The word you're looking for in your example is "new", or possibly "trendy".
Ok, that puts him in the zone of “real” punk. I was thinking he was a millennial. And no offense intended to any young punk rockers. It’s just a different thing when you’re imitating your parents or grandparents generation down to wearing the exact same clothing. Nothing wrong with that, but it ain’t counter culture.
I know very little about Vice but even after taking into consideration everything posted here, I'm still rather dubious that this is sufficient to warrant the label "counterculture"
when other companies go bankrupt they go away for good, like Washington Mutual; when media companies go bankrupt they just change hands but still exist, like Newsweek.
Plenty of other companies continue after bankruptcy restructuring as well. American Airlines, General Motors, and Marvel Entertainment all went through bankruptcy in their past.
Yeah I think finance might be the exception more than the rule. If you're gm people might say "oh they make good cars but didn't get the finances right, so they had some trouble". The brand isn't hurt. But if your main product is financial, if your brand value is directly dependent on the financial security people feel about it, bankruptcy is a major blow to the brand.
what on earth do people think neoliberalism means suddenly? it means free trade but out of nowhere I see zoomers treating it like it's some kind of bogeyman?
That definition of neoliberalism falls a bit short, don't you think? Core concepts of neoliberalism are:
1. Deregulation
2. Free global trade
3. Financial globalization
4. Some varying kinds of austerity politics by governments
5. Privatization of public goods
Take alone those five points and scan through the western history of the past 30 years and tell me the aforementioned concepts are not the cause of most of our current crises.
I'm not even an anticapitalist, in fact I believe most people who claim to be anticapitalist are actually anti-neoliberals.
Good definition, but then you see people like Trump being called "Neoliberal" when he definitely didn't allow free trade and, in fact, implemented tariffs.
Trump's "America First" economic policy was the opposite of Neoliberalism.
You also get Democrats who signed on to stimulus packages (again, opposite of Neoliberal austerity) being called "Neoliberal" by their detractors.
Those were the spearheads, I would say. Trump represented more the "nationalism-but-profiting-from-globalizationism" type to me. There was certainly more protectionism in his policies than neoliberalism (originally) intended.
Politicians like Trump, Johnson and others to me are a symptom of the problems neoliberalism caused. If you de-industrialize your country and outsource workers class jobs to low-wage countries then you seed a majority of pissed off workers.
Calling Trump neoliberal is blatantly wrong from my pov. He's mainly a nationalist who is able to assemble the angry people (that have good reason to be angry) behind him and initiates culture wars.
All that is just driven by opportunistic politicians and megacorps who willingly bite the hand that feeds 'em: Without a halfway functional society there's no good business long term.
It means more than just free trade though. It's free trade on every level of society, not just between countries. Ironically, it's the exact category of logical error that Adam Smith points out in Mercantilism in "The Wealth Of Nations", except it's done in reverse. Neoliberalism is essentially the (mis)application of macroeconomic logic to microeconomics, which leads to the conclusion that the market optimizes for the public good, a conclusion which is held as an article of faith among neoliberals.
Their almost religious fervor gave them a lot of impetus for a while, but as examples of neoliberal policy failing to live up to the promise have been piling up in the last 30 years, their currency of "dude, trust me" has faced significant devaluation.
It's lead to the dismantlement and privatization of of social institutions to the clear detriment of everyone who isn't a shareholder in the privately owned replacements. The American prison system is perhaps the best example of this going awry.
I wonder if they confused neoliberal with liberal? Similar words, very different meaning. Either way, wishing for even less echo chambers in the media is not constructive or beneficial for society.
It is indeed a very vaguely defined term! But i don't think it has ever meant free trade. Free trade is key plank of classical liberalism. But neoliberalism is about replacing state or community action with markets in the domestic sphere - privatization, deregulation, reframing users of services like education and public transport as customers rather than students or passengers, generally "giving people choices" rather than taking responsibility for providing services.
Vice had one of my favorite pieces of internet content ever, maybe this is a business lesson about "stick to the knitting" or something... "stick to the pointy Mexican boots"
Not only that, but Vice produced some of the highest quality, and only "mildly western-biased" reporting we have seen from world events.
See the 100+ dispatches from Ukraine 2014 mostly by Kamil Ostrovsky.[1]
But with time the amount of content by Vice literally exploded in magnitudes, and so did the quality of content and journalism.
Don't get me wrong, Vice still produced many other interesting contents, but eventually it has been so watered down by so many types of content that finding relevant or quality journalism became very difficult.
I wish they stuck with their initial spirit of focusing on quality reporting and content from around the world (NK, Ukraine, Africa etc), they would've built a terrific journalistic niche for themselves. A niche that I can't find anyone to be able to fill.
I may have expressed myself poorly, what I meant is that their interesting and quality reporting quickly became rarer among the huge amount of articles like the one you posted.
I guess that they tried to go for the click baity route of odd content to get more views, a route that is full of competition and has a hard time retaining recurrent readers.
I would've preferred they stuck with building a (definitely more expensive) niche of journalism in the spirit they were initially founded.
What does making breakfast with someone's vagina have to do with a specific generation, the youngest members of which were already working or in college when that particular article came out, and the oldest members of which were raising their own adolescents? Why does everything weird and alternative still automatically get labeled as "millenial" stuff?
The comments here really make you lose faith in our ability to communicate as a society. So many comments about Vice having become "too left"/"not moderate" where I'm uncertain with the examples where the line is between the writer expecting something super right as moderate or if I myself am way left. Otherwise ok comments arbitrary grouping and sigmatizing people. I think we've almost reached a complete breakdown in our ability to communicate with each other, at least in written form.
If you read or watched Vice News cca. 2014-2018, there was indeed plenty of high quality journalism. What’s that article got to do with it? And why do you think it caters to millenials specifically?
Stop shitting over everyone with this obscure fact. When people hear vice they think their heyday of video content. You’re not cool or in the know for correcting people who are discussing this (the thing that made them famous in the first place.)
Eddie Huang did a street food series with them that was also fantastic called Huang's World. I'm pretty sure it used to be called something else. What I liked about Vice was it all felt very unpolished. Huang, nonplussed, hangs with famous pornstar Jada Stevens while she's doing a shoot on the Bang Bus. That behind the scenes vibe dominated Vice video for a long time extending to their war coverage.
Funny because before Disney, akwafina was just hanging around with Eddie Huang on vice. Now she’s in all sorts of Disney stuff. I guess getting in bed w/ disney means you’ll die and disney will pick the morsels it likes
Publications are the Journalists that work there, and the culture that they create. If this is the end of Vice as a platform, it's not the end of that culture or the careers of the people that built it. Those journalists will take that culture of investigative, deep and sometimes immersive (gonzo?) journalism elsewhere.
Here in the UK we saw it with Buzzfeed News UK, when is was shut down in 2020 the journalists dispersed into other news organisations, some that they had worked with before (they had collaborated with C4 and BBC News on investigations), and have continued their important investigative work. I believe we will see the same with both Vice and Buzzfeed News (US).
Some will cheer its downfall, but there is an important place for all styles of journalism from all political leanings.
I absolutely loved the deep investigation side of vice.
They lost me at the 10th iteration of "We smoked weed of of X" and some other low effort content about 4 or 5 years ago.
"Those journalists will take that culture of investigative, deep and sometimes immersive (gonzo?) journalism elsewhere."
I hope you are correct. I do worry though if this might require funding and general corporate buy-in these journalists might not get elsewhere. I also worry about their arguments carrying less weight in other organizations because "we did this at Vice" is now tainted. If Vice had been a massive success their suggestions would have gotten extra weight instead of now causing caution.
What do you mean should. If they did they wouldn't have existed to begin with. These things were always a minority of their content and it could never have been any other way.
Does anyone care to explain why on earth they don't have the "donate" button underneath their Youtube videos considering the number people who (still) appreciate the quality of their reporting on certain topics?
Is it because they get demonetized?
Probably because they are a for profit corporation, not a charity. So the same reason why there’s not a tip jar in your neurosurgeon’s office and no donate button on AP videos.
Neurosurgeon doesn't give his/hers content for free, Vice does.
I would like to offer my token of appreciation through one or multiple "tips" when I encounter a FREE video I really liked, same way I do to some other content creators.
Vice’s business model doesn’t run on tips, it runs on ads and YouTube revenue split.
That’s nice that you want to tip a huge corporation but it seems that you are rare enough that Vice hasn’t found it meaningful enough to add a tip method.
Personally, seeing a tip jar on a “news” organization’s content would be about as welcome as seeing a tip dialog at my dentist office.
Did Vice kill itself, or was it murdered? I haven't paid a lot of attention, but it seems like Vice's content started going down hill right after they got into bed with Disney and Murdoch.
Disney... and Vice... Welcome to 2015!
I suppose the YouTube adpocalypse followed shortly after, too, demonetising political content. So, a perfect storm. No more money from political content, suddenly, and now your biggest shareholders, Disney and Murdoch, demand change to keep up. Shame that.
There's a rhyme that ends with "go broke"... I have seen a number of rather toxic Vice articles in the past few years, I wonder how profitable that turned out to be? I have a vague memory of them being edgy and interesting, but that's a long time ago.
Still, I'm sure I only saw fragments of their total body of work so it might be a skewed perception. My sympathies for those affected, these are tough times we are entering.
I don't want to name any specific examples to avoid derailing this discussion, but I've seen a few articles that were so bewilderingly incorrect that it almost seemed like the author somehow didn't have a good grasp of the English language or something. There weren't a huge number of them, but there were a few.
The thing then is: should I then trust other articles? I don't mind if publications have a political bent, either to the left or right, or if some opinion piece has some pretty far-out ridiculous views on something or the other (within limits). But journalistic pieces and even opinion pieces should get basic facts right and they shouldn't blatantly misquote people. I don't want to research and verify everything in-depth, so there needs to be some trust relationship between a publisher and the reader.
Every publication makes mistakes. It happens. But at some point the mistakes become severe enough that the trust starts to disappear. Misleading outrage drives attention, clicks, and views in the short term, but the long-term effects may be quite destructive if you're not careful.
I understand that the topic is contentious indeed, but I agree fully. I tried to be balanced in my comment, but even hinting at a certain possible content profile caused some upset it seems.
I also see now that they've published several high quality non-political eg warzone pieces recently; that's a real loss. I'm hoping these journalists will find a new space going forward, without the other baggage.
This view is under appreciated. I honestly do not care all that much if a news source has a political point of view, so long as it is _honest_. If they're honest I can deal with it. If I am interested in a labor dispute and I go to "world communist daily revolution worldwide" for their take and "capitalist Ayn Rand weekly" for their take, if both are honest between the two I can probably figure out what's actually happening.
It's possible to look at the same set of facts and to interpret them differently depending on perspective. I accept this, but _please_, can we come to agree to the same set of facts?
The problem is we're well past cherry-picking facts and well into making things up from whole cloth. The amount of 'news' that I read that is just absurdly wrong is disturbing. As soon as I find out a source seems to intentionally lie to me I discard it entirely. I'm more or less out of sources at this point.
Alot of media companies changed their standards and ethics in 2016 when the "wrong person" won an election they determined it was their job to ensure that "never happens again"
Never really liked Vice. Something about the way it is filmed, making reality more "dramatic". Even though it seemed on average good quality reporting.
They managed to embed with our elite LRR special forces (our only tier 1 unit) which was very secretive and maybe the only time anyone will see them in action.
Vice to me was always just “high quality” news for people who read Pitchfork and the Fader and listened to Danny Brown and Ariel Pink.
In hindsight its “good content” of the war and drugs sort doesn’t feel too far off from the original angle of low-brow edginess that I feel like evolved and predated things like the “dirtbag left” and “El chapo traphouse” with less of a political bend.
I’m sort of confused as to what carried it into being heralded as a “digital colossus”, whose decline is described as part of the “end of an era” next to Buzzfeed News. Granted, once my own “New York nights at 21 edgy” phase tapered off around 2015-2016, I stopped regularly paying attention to it. At least Buzzfeed News had the accolades to justify its merit.
I suspect that around 2015-2016, right around the time when Supreme got sold to VF Corporation and Kanye and Kim Kardashian were in their prime, and Trump first stopped on (or off?) that escalator…there was a “vibe shift”…and whatever underlying cultural tones that everything that I’m describing can be categorized under sort of seemed “marketable”? But after Trump was elected, the vibe shifted again hard, and I guess Vice couldn’t keep up. Their target demographic is aging and the generation who follows them probably doesn’t have the stomach to tolerate their lack of taste and can probably figure out the “war and drugs” stuff on their own.
I don’t know. So much of this calls to forlorn days and I don’t expect much of the HN crowd to feel where I’m coming from.
I think some of that vibe shift was happening anyway and the Trump presidency just pushed it into overdrive as the numbers were all pointing towards easy gains from doing that (similar to CNN's high ratings throughout his presidency).
Pitchfork following the 2015 Conde Nast acquisition was the actual point where it drifted off imo into being wildly predictable with what it would champion.
Several others (most notably for me the avclub) had had several years of struggles then a very abrupt and marked decline in content with Univision acquisitions circa 2015/2016; eventually blurring into a uniform kind of sludge that seemed to intentionally blur the lines between several once disparate audiences. Meanwhile attempts to create new outlets for the content that had been ditched tended to commercially flop (e.g. the Dissolve)
Relatively speaking Vice was a lot better than most of these outlets in that it would still occasionally have some good content, but I guess this was largely due to the value of its brand ensuring it weathered that wave of acquisitions.
Okay, so I'm not tripping. This is just the first time I've had to think critically about the mid-2010s awkward bend that I think you describe well, "a uniform kind of sludge that seemed to intentionally blur the lines between several once disparate audiences." At the time, I never paid much attention to how stiff the competition was during this period and how much money was being shoveled into the media outlets in such a weird market.
Now I'm reminded of an associate who was afforded a job opportunity at Vice that was basically an invitation to shill junk food on Twitter. And Verizon owning Complex Magazine (which is now apparently owned by BuzzFeed...)
Vice and HBO had some good contents in early days. They reported on stuff mass media _failed_ to report on especially following the GFC when America was going through some tough times.
The most memorable was David Choe reporting on scrap metal scavenging in rust belt cities. That one,
for some reason, hit me really hard.
I'm not sure why you think HBO has gone downhill -- I wouldn't compare vice and HBO. One was supposed to be a news organization the other entertainment.
HBO is still banging out great TV shows. Last of Us is the most recent that comes to mind.
Vice was on YouTube before HBO and I definitely recall that -- not to mention it's own website hosted it's own videos before HBO. You guys are making out like that HBO/Vice are somewhat interchangeable terms like Google/Alphabet and it's not.
I am not saying that at all. I was simply referring to Vice production on HBO. I should’ve worded it better but this is just a casual message board for me.
“Vice Media originally broadcast their news programs on HBO, which broadcast the Emmy-winning[13] weekly documentary series Vice, which premiered in April 2013.”
I’m not saying that they are interchangeable. I’m saying that Vice News programs were funded initially by HBO. It would be like if Stranger Things moved from Netflix to Hulu. It doesn’t mean that they are interchangeable terms, but that it started with Netflix and moved.
I used to love vice. They had some of the most engaging content covering things I'd never see. But then it all started to unravel when the platform mostly turned into cringey hipster New Yorkers telling me about their preferred way to consume weed 10 times a day.
yeah, if you think this is what they have been doing for the past few years, then you haven't really bothered to check out their work. They have been consistently doing some amazing international reporting that none of the mainstream media channels were/are interested in.
It’s not the only thing, but it’s the mostly thing.
Looking at their front page right now, over half the articles are buzzfeed-quality rubbish:
-“America Has Decided That Homeless People Aren't People”
-“5 Experts Tell us What They Think a Healthy Relationship Looks Like”
-“This Week's Coolest Drops, From Hoka to 'Seinfeld' x Percival”
-“Russia Wants to Build a MAGA Colony for US Conservatives, Lawyer Claims”
-“THIS WEEK ONLINE – Who's Afraid of the Proletariat?”
-“I Went to a BDSM Convention With My Ex”
They still have some original reporting, but I stopped going to them years ago because I don’t want to filter through dreck, and certainly aren’t signing up for their updates, in order to watch for decent items.
It does seem like hipster stuff and I don’t understand who would want to consistently read this and who their target market is.
They seem to hire lots of people to write this stuff and are looking to be a “lifestyle news” brand but who wants to be into their nihilistic, negative lifestyle?
Oh, I didn't even think of their website articles because I barely go there. I might be wrong here but when most people think of Vice today, they think of their shows or the content on Youtube. Their news show was consistently doing great original work (some of which they would post on Youtube).
Vice always did clickbait / lifestyle, but they also invested heavily in real hard hitting stories that other outlets ignored. Of course they also continued the clickbait / lifestyle stuff alongside it.
For a while the Real Reporting was surfacing frequently, but not so much these days, even though they're still doing it. For whatever reason, people just don't seem to see / care / value that Real Reporting as much (I have my theories...), and these outlets are struggling.
Well this is what happens when you appeal to the 'Cringey hipster New Yorkers' and alienate your old viewership of showing underground or under-reported investigative journalism before 2012.
Now it seems like the readers have punished Vice when they went down that route in 2012 and all that got them was into bankruptcy much faster than they tried to predict Twitter's collapse.
Given that they chose to do that to themselves, nothing of value was lost. Henceforth:
Vice was started by three Canadian junkies (they literally called themselves that), and for years was only available in print in the hippest neighborhoods of major cities, while printing salacious material that later became published as books like "The Vice Guide to Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll" and "DOs & DON'Ts 2: 17 Years of Street Fashion Critiques". Very little reporting.
Then slowly, over the years, the reporting arm emerged as a force to be reckoned with, but it was for "cringey hipsters" first. The old, OLD readership.
I'd argue it ended around the GFC, so say ~15 years ago.
They did some interesting reporting leading up to the crash, the occupy movement, etc.. and then blanded out for sure.
When Vice was just the magazine, it was pretty influential considering it was just, basically, three guys. Gavin McInnes gets a lot of stick these days, but he was pretty instrumental to establishing the baseline "Vice-voice."
It kept its unique voice for a decent amount of time, but it eventually sank into a mode where it was where you went to hear the same things you heard anywhere else, but with a bit more blue language as an affectation of authenticity.
Going from Hipster Mad Magazine to Hipster National Geographic worked for far longer than I would have guessed.
Some of their early well known content was where to get coke in Brooklyn and how to sleep with a stripper. And in 2006, that was edgy ny hipster content. That was their brand from the absolute beginning. They just happened to also do some good video journalism along the way.
So you just made up a story of fictional version of Vice being taken over by trust fund Millenials (whatever that means) and you didn't realize that the content you hate was present in Vice from start to finish of its lifecycle (and may have even made its actual journalism possible). And then, when called out on it, you pretended you did know that all along.
Yes and what it was successful as was something else again. The trust fund kiddies went away and actually interesting people took over. Then the trust fund kiddies came back and ran it to the ground. Same thing as reddit.
Well, it literally started as a Montreal hipster magazine. And yes, it fairly early moved to NYC but it was still kind of an indie cultural/hipster magazine for stuff like funny fashion "dos and don'ts" and music and cultural scene stuff. It wasn't really left-political at all. The shift to an American liberal news orientation happened post-9/11, and probably in the context of Occupy Wall St etc.
If Vice had stuck to making sensible documentaries and news coverage, they could have focused on that niche while selling their content to Amazon, Netflix, Apple, etc.... Hopefully this bankruptcy is an opportunity for that.
They were really good for drugs coverage, and I mean that beyond the "New York Hipster smoking weed 100 times a day" comment someone else made here.
Max Daly's probably the best drug reporter out there, and was the main reason I kept tuned in for so long. Was really the last bastion of their decent content.
Didn’t they break the krokodil story in the mid-2010s? That coverage was some of the best footage I’ve ever seen. I think they also did that crazy shoot about the drug that turns people in clubs and bars into zombies in South America and allows the perps to control their victims like puppets. The drug in question also wipes the memory of the victims so they can’t report the crime. That was one of the scariest videos ever made. It really had an impact on me and I think I lost my faith in humanity for about a year after I saw it.
I was kinda thinking more along the lines (ahem) of reporting on drug policy and harm reduction, and in challenging shitty tabloid journalism on drugs.
I ran across their North Korea report when it was posted 11 years ago and was an instant fan. Shane was compelling and of course the topic was fascinating. Very few people had gotten in there and brought film out like that before, that I had seen at least. Very eye opening
Irrespective of the reason, this really makes me sad. Vice had made some of the most incredible content and dared to go places others simply wouldn't.
As a Pakistani, I can tell you it's very rare to see media go there. Even movies that are supposed to be set in Pakistan (Zero Dark Thirty, A Mighty Heart, etc) are filmed next door in India. And other than maybe Al-Jazeera, I rarely see international media reporting from on the ground.
Vice not only went to Pakistan, but they did at least three episodes I can recall from there. And they covered some pretty important things, such as the disfunction that resulted in Pakistan being one of the last countries to still have polio.
I speak of Pakistan as one example because I know how little our stories are represented in mainstream media, but there are many other examples where Vice seemed to be the only ones willing to go on the ground. Other examples include North Korea, Haiti, and Syria. I'll never forget watching Isobel Yeung courageously reporting in Syria while bombs literally could be heard exploding around her.
Can you explain what TF is going on with Imran Khan? Everyone I see talking about it is either American or Indian and I'm sure they're wrong about basically every detail.
What happened to Imran Khan is similar to what happened to and continues to happen to world leaders in unstable countries where the west financial and/or national security interests - sloppy regime changes.
As far as whether or not this turns out for the people of PK, we will never know bc he was nto in office long enough to do anything meaningful. PK needs like 20 yrs of stability to see any real progress.
I will say this - Imran Khan was very popular among the young, middle class types I know in PK (bc he is a populist), but not liked by western establishment governments. Take that for what it is worth.
The military have quite a strong political influence in Pakistan I think?
There is some parallel to Turkey, the military there had a lot of influence, until Erdogan out maneuvered them. The military in Turkey were supposedly protecting democracy and keeping the state secular, but threatening coups against democratically elected politicians doesn't scream protecting democracy to me.
European countries had a working relationship with Erdogan in the beginning because of this. Obviously power corrupted in the end.
It feels like a similar situation with Imran Khan (both did time in prison on politically motivated charges), but I don't know enough about Pakistani politics to be sure.
The reason for the strong political influence of the military is two fold:
1. Political institutions in Pakistan are very weak and when things start to truly go bad, people look toward the military to bring law and order and not their elected leaders. This in turn gives the military a seat at the table to impact internal matters and foreign relations.
2. India - using India as a general boogeyman since independence has given the military brass a lot of money and power. They in turn use this to further their political ideology and when things start to go a way they don’t like they can start a coup. In turn the people generally go along with this as they think army control might be better than their leaders to solve their issues.
Like it was mentioned, Pakistan needs a few decades of peaceful democracy to get their shit together. Otherwise it will keep circling the drain of being a failed state.
This was my take as well. Kahn signed an arms deal with Russia just days before the Ukrainian conflict happened. Less than two weeks after the invasion happened he was ousted from office. Pretty unusual, Imran Kahn has been wildly popular in Pakistan for decades, since at least the mid-1980s where he was a Cricket (sport) superstar
To understand what's going on requires a deep understanding of Pakistan and its "military-veto democracy". This is the best explanation I've seen, from a veteran Indian journalist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0boy9JdZfWE
tl;dw: The powers-that-be in Pakistan -- the army and whichever political dynasty the army favors that day -- routinely overrule the popular vote because they don't believe that democracy will always spit out the best candidate. This is partly due to arrogance but also because the institutions that are supposed to keep a check on harmful populism in Pakistan are broken or corrupt. These powers-that-be have decided that IK is bad for Pakistan (twist: they're probably right about this; IK is a religious fundamentalist and a giveaway socialist in a country that is broke) and have invoked "special measures" to keep his name off the ballot or the ballot away from the people. Understandably, this has angered the people who have taken to the streets.
My impression (from western sources) is that he adopted religion and married a religious wife to distance himself from his western playboy past and broaden his political appeal. He chose a wife who is Sufi, which is a form of Islam that is legally accepted in Pakistan but which has been attacked for not being strict enough, because it focuses more on religious experience and less on religious rules than conservative scholars would like.
It seems like a smart choice for a politician who needed to cement his religious status to be viable in an overwhelmingly religious country but wanted to avoid the appearance of insincerity or hypocrisy in cases where he decides not to support conservative religious political policies.
These psychological explanations are post hoc justifications. Instead of pretending to know what internally motivates people, it's far more practical and fruitful (and dangerous) to look at who finances people. I guarantee the reason isn't because the army (whichever army or "whatever political dynasty") just wants what's best for people.
Imran Khan is one of a very few leaders in that entire region who is not corrupt, by general consensus. His political program is heavily social (practically socialist), as well as (unsurprisingly) anti-corruption. These are all great things, if you are the average Pakistani, hence his popularity.
Whether he is a good leader for the country is another matter. He is principled to a fault, which is probably also his downfall. In the world of realpolitik, he probably never stood a chance. It is questionable if he could ever actually carry out his policies, having antagonized practically the entire state apparatus.
I am not Pakistani but I was always surprised at the lack of attention too. Pakistan is a giant country with a ton of people and some pretty insane geography (mountains I mean) and yet there is not much media made in general about it.
It wouldn't be beneath VICE to use sound editing to put bomb sounds into takes that didn't have them there to begin with. They quite literally have no journalism code of ethics.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadSo I guess the $400M acquisition bids that were reported didn't go through?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35780517
One of my favorite recent videos from Kurt Caz is where he travels on the world's most dangerous road in Bolivia with Kevin the llama.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWGCSct5ONo
Their conclusion on Vice was that it was never in the same league as BuzzFeed or similar in terms of traffic, but had one of the most pure and influential brands in the space.
> [Vice] had one of the most pure and influential brands in the space
I also remember the Intel Vice campaign. Shows that Vice had such a strong appeal that Intel really wanted to reach out to their younger demographics back then.
As many have pointed out, I haven't seen their articles or videos going viral recently. When Shane Smith left, it seems that the voice of counterculture and rebellion disappeared from the editorial leadership.
> Shane Smith is a Canadian journalist and media executive and former billionaire.
I can't be the only person who finds the application of the term "counterculture" here rather a debasement of the concept.
I’m not sure why money would be the measure for whether someone was counter-cultural enough, especially when they made their money through providing something that the mainstream (at the time, certainly) was not.
Maybe it did in the 70s. But anything past that it’s basically the opposite. Punk music is oldies; literally half century old tradition at this point. It’s like calling folk music counter culture.
Aside from that, what does age have to do with being counter-cultural or not? The word you're looking for in your example is "new", or possibly "trendy".
> You're just clueless.
And you're just rude.
> I can't be the only person who finds the application of the term "counterculture" here rather a debasement of the concept.
which isn't an objective factual statement and is therefore neither right nor wrong. Maybe you meant to use a word like "unjustified"?
1. Deregulation
2. Free global trade
3. Financial globalization
4. Some varying kinds of austerity politics by governments
5. Privatization of public goods
Take alone those five points and scan through the western history of the past 30 years and tell me the aforementioned concepts are not the cause of most of our current crises.
I'm not even an anticapitalist, in fact I believe most people who claim to be anticapitalist are actually anti-neoliberals.
Trump's "America First" economic policy was the opposite of Neoliberalism.
You also get Democrats who signed on to stimulus packages (again, opposite of Neoliberal austerity) being called "Neoliberal" by their detractors.
As far as I can see, it's a snarl term.
Calling Trump neoliberal is blatantly wrong from my pov. He's mainly a nationalist who is able to assemble the angry people (that have good reason to be angry) behind him and initiates culture wars.
All that is just driven by opportunistic politicians and megacorps who willingly bite the hand that feeds 'em: Without a halfway functional society there's no good business long term.
Their almost religious fervor gave them a lot of impetus for a while, but as examples of neoliberal policy failing to live up to the promise have been piling up in the last 30 years, their currency of "dude, trust me" has faced significant devaluation.
It's lead to the dismantlement and privatization of of social institutions to the clear detriment of everyone who isn't a shareholder in the privately owned replacements. The American prison system is perhaps the best example of this going awry.
I can't see how Vice is neoliberal at all.
http://web.archive.org/web/20230128213354/https://www.vice.c...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veQkt4tS0Tc
See the 100+ dispatches from Ukraine 2014 mostly by Kamil Ostrovsky.[1]
But with time the amount of content by Vice literally exploded in magnitudes, and so did the quality of content and journalism.
Don't get me wrong, Vice still produced many other interesting contents, but eventually it has been so watered down by so many types of content that finding relevant or quality journalism became very difficult.
I wish they stuck with their initial spirit of focusing on quality reporting and content from around the world (NK, Ukraine, Africa etc), they would've built a terrific journalistic niche for themselves. A niche that I can't find anyone to be able to fill.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNKsLlK52ss
https://www.vice.com/en/article/mgbx9q/how-to-make-breakfast...
Appears catering only to millenials wasn't the best idea.
I guess that they tried to go for the click baity route of odd content to get more views, a route that is full of competition and has a hard time retaining recurrent readers.
I would've preferred they stuck with building a (definitely more expensive) niche of journalism in the spirit they were initially founded.
Fwiw he seems to be not very impressed with Vice's management https://twitter.com/SimonOstrovsky/status/165319938725684019...
Here in the UK we saw it with Buzzfeed News UK, when is was shut down in 2020 the journalists dispersed into other news organisations, some that they had worked with before (they had collaborated with C4 and BBC News on investigations), and have continued their important investigative work. I believe we will see the same with both Vice and Buzzfeed News (US).
Some will cheer its downfall, but there is an important place for all styles of journalism from all political leanings.
I'm sure tabloids and yellow rags are always looking for cheap writers, plenty of them still exist.
I hope you are correct. I do worry though if this might require funding and general corporate buy-in these journalists might not get elsewhere. I also worry about their arguments carrying less weight in other organizations because "we did this at Vice" is now tainted. If Vice had been a massive success their suggestions would have gotten extra weight instead of now causing caution.
Golf, Booze & Guns: Inside Boomer Paradise -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jp0nqJ1yrrg
Inside the Wellness Festival for Millionaires -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BbNvim11fI
Scams, Zealots, and Jet Skis: Life Inside the Crypto Scene -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9hXfBo8Abo
The Untouchable Chaebols of South Korea -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jFZge6V_is
"Be A Man”: Modernists and Traditionalists Debate Masculinity -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nE3EQEBzc0
Mexico's Most Wanted Drug Kingpin -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RZoGOc3VCs
Tantra Island: The Search for Sexual Paradise -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UsWj15AFRs
Hamiltons Pharmacopeia -- https://www.vicetv.com/en_us/show/hamiltons-pharmacopeia
Vice’s business model doesn’t run on tips, it runs on ads and YouTube revenue split.
That’s nice that you want to tip a huge corporation but it seems that you are rare enough that Vice hasn’t found it meaningful enough to add a tip method.
Personally, seeing a tip jar on a “news” organization’s content would be about as welcome as seeing a tip dialog at my dentist office.
Disney... and Vice... Welcome to 2015!
I suppose the YouTube adpocalypse followed shortly after, too, demonetising political content. So, a perfect storm. No more money from political content, suddenly, and now your biggest shareholders, Disney and Murdoch, demand change to keep up. Shame that.
Still, I'm sure I only saw fragments of their total body of work so it might be a skewed perception. My sympathies for those affected, these are tough times we are entering.
The thing then is: should I then trust other articles? I don't mind if publications have a political bent, either to the left or right, or if some opinion piece has some pretty far-out ridiculous views on something or the other (within limits). But journalistic pieces and even opinion pieces should get basic facts right and they shouldn't blatantly misquote people. I don't want to research and verify everything in-depth, so there needs to be some trust relationship between a publisher and the reader.
Every publication makes mistakes. It happens. But at some point the mistakes become severe enough that the trust starts to disappear. Misleading outrage drives attention, clicks, and views in the short term, but the long-term effects may be quite destructive if you're not careful.
I also see now that they've published several high quality non-political eg warzone pieces recently; that's a real loss. I'm hoping these journalists will find a new space going forward, without the other baggage.
It's possible to look at the same set of facts and to interpret them differently depending on perspective. I accept this, but _please_, can we come to agree to the same set of facts?
The problem is we're well past cherry-picking facts and well into making things up from whole cloth. The amount of 'news' that I read that is just absurdly wrong is disturbing. As soon as I find out a source seems to intentionally lie to me I discard it entirely. I'm more or less out of sources at this point.
They managed to embed with our elite LRR special forces (our only tier 1 unit) which was very secretive and maybe the only time anyone will see them in action.
In hindsight its “good content” of the war and drugs sort doesn’t feel too far off from the original angle of low-brow edginess that I feel like evolved and predated things like the “dirtbag left” and “El chapo traphouse” with less of a political bend.
I’m sort of confused as to what carried it into being heralded as a “digital colossus”, whose decline is described as part of the “end of an era” next to Buzzfeed News. Granted, once my own “New York nights at 21 edgy” phase tapered off around 2015-2016, I stopped regularly paying attention to it. At least Buzzfeed News had the accolades to justify its merit.
I suspect that around 2015-2016, right around the time when Supreme got sold to VF Corporation and Kanye and Kim Kardashian were in their prime, and Trump first stopped on (or off?) that escalator…there was a “vibe shift”…and whatever underlying cultural tones that everything that I’m describing can be categorized under sort of seemed “marketable”? But after Trump was elected, the vibe shifted again hard, and I guess Vice couldn’t keep up. Their target demographic is aging and the generation who follows them probably doesn’t have the stomach to tolerate their lack of taste and can probably figure out the “war and drugs” stuff on their own.
I don’t know. So much of this calls to forlorn days and I don’t expect much of the HN crowd to feel where I’m coming from.
If you know you know.
Pitchfork following the 2015 Conde Nast acquisition was the actual point where it drifted off imo into being wildly predictable with what it would champion.
Several others (most notably for me the avclub) had had several years of struggles then a very abrupt and marked decline in content with Univision acquisitions circa 2015/2016; eventually blurring into a uniform kind of sludge that seemed to intentionally blur the lines between several once disparate audiences. Meanwhile attempts to create new outlets for the content that had been ditched tended to commercially flop (e.g. the Dissolve)
Relatively speaking Vice was a lot better than most of these outlets in that it would still occasionally have some good content, but I guess this was largely due to the value of its brand ensuring it weathered that wave of acquisitions.
Now I'm reminded of an associate who was afforded a job opportunity at Vice that was basically an invitation to shill junk food on Twitter. And Verizon owning Complex Magazine (which is now apparently owned by BuzzFeed...)
What an odd time. No wonder it fell apart.
The most memorable was David Choe reporting on scrap metal scavenging in rust belt cities. That one, for some reason, hit me really hard.
HBO is still banging out great TV shows. Last of Us is the most recent that comes to mind.
It since expanded out to YouTube and everywhere else. And I think hbo cancelled it and it moved to Showtime a few years ago.
Vice was on YouTube before HBO and I definitely recall that -- not to mention it's own website hosted it's own videos before HBO. You guys are making out like that HBO/Vice are somewhat interchangeable terms like Google/Alphabet and it's not.
I’m not saying that they are interchangeable. I’m saying that Vice News programs were funded initially by HBO. It would be like if Stranger Things moved from Netflix to Hulu. It doesn’t mean that they are interchangeable terms, but that it started with Netflix and moved.
Looking at their front page right now, over half the articles are buzzfeed-quality rubbish:
-“America Has Decided That Homeless People Aren't People”
-“5 Experts Tell us What They Think a Healthy Relationship Looks Like”
-“This Week's Coolest Drops, From Hoka to 'Seinfeld' x Percival”
-“Russia Wants to Build a MAGA Colony for US Conservatives, Lawyer Claims”
-“THIS WEEK ONLINE – Who's Afraid of the Proletariat?” -“I Went to a BDSM Convention With My Ex”
They still have some original reporting, but I stopped going to them years ago because I don’t want to filter through dreck, and certainly aren’t signing up for their updates, in order to watch for decent items.
It does seem like hipster stuff and I don’t understand who would want to consistently read this and who their target market is.
They seem to hire lots of people to write this stuff and are looking to be a “lifestyle news” brand but who wants to be into their nihilistic, negative lifestyle?
Vice always did clickbait / lifestyle, but they also invested heavily in real hard hitting stories that other outlets ignored. Of course they also continued the clickbait / lifestyle stuff alongside it.
For a while the Real Reporting was surfacing frequently, but not so much these days, even though they're still doing it. For whatever reason, people just don't seem to see / care / value that Real Reporting as much (I have my theories...), and these outlets are struggling.
Now it seems like the readers have punished Vice when they went down that route in 2012 and all that got them was into bankruptcy much faster than they tried to predict Twitter's collapse.
Given that they chose to do that to themselves, nothing of value was lost. Henceforth:
Good riddance.
Vice was started by three Canadian junkies (they literally called themselves that), and for years was only available in print in the hippest neighborhoods of major cities, while printing salacious material that later became published as books like "The Vice Guide to Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll" and "DOs & DON'Ts 2: 17 Years of Street Fashion Critiques". Very little reporting.
Then slowly, over the years, the reporting arm emerged as a force to be reckoned with, but it was for "cringey hipsters" first. The old, OLD readership.
It converged on consensus left mainstream media after that.
It kept its unique voice for a decent amount of time, but it eventually sank into a mode where it was where you went to hear the same things you heard anywhere else, but with a bit more blue language as an affectation of authenticity.
Going from Hipster Mad Magazine to Hipster National Geographic worked for far longer than I would have guessed.
What something starts as and what it succeeds at are two very different things.
So you just made up a story of fictional version of Vice being taken over by trust fund Millenials (whatever that means) and you didn't realize that the content you hate was present in Vice from start to finish of its lifecycle (and may have even made its actual journalism possible). And then, when called out on it, you pretended you did know that all along.
Max Daly's probably the best drug reporter out there, and was the main reason I kept tuned in for so long. Was really the last bastion of their decent content.
Really sorry, but this just reminded me of this clip: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ia7fUQXskvA
Some older examples:
- https://www.vice.com/en/article/ppvgw8/is-the-drug-trade-rea...
- https://www.vice.com/en/article/4wm5xq/drug-statistics-uk-dr...
- https://www.vice.com/en/article/jmk4p3/glue-sniffing-epidemi...
https://youtu.be/24R8JObNNQ4
As a Pakistani, I can tell you it's very rare to see media go there. Even movies that are supposed to be set in Pakistan (Zero Dark Thirty, A Mighty Heart, etc) are filmed next door in India. And other than maybe Al-Jazeera, I rarely see international media reporting from on the ground.
Vice not only went to Pakistan, but they did at least three episodes I can recall from there. And they covered some pretty important things, such as the disfunction that resulted in Pakistan being one of the last countries to still have polio.
I speak of Pakistan as one example because I know how little our stories are represented in mainstream media, but there are many other examples where Vice seemed to be the only ones willing to go on the ground. Other examples include North Korea, Haiti, and Syria. I'll never forget watching Isobel Yeung courageously reporting in Syria while bombs literally could be heard exploding around her.
It's good what happened? It's bad? He's in jail?
What happened to Imran Khan is similar to what happened to and continues to happen to world leaders in unstable countries where the west financial and/or national security interests - sloppy regime changes.
As far as whether or not this turns out for the people of PK, we will never know bc he was nto in office long enough to do anything meaningful. PK needs like 20 yrs of stability to see any real progress.
I will say this - Imran Khan was very popular among the young, middle class types I know in PK (bc he is a populist), but not liked by western establishment governments. Take that for what it is worth.
There is some parallel to Turkey, the military there had a lot of influence, until Erdogan out maneuvered them. The military in Turkey were supposedly protecting democracy and keeping the state secular, but threatening coups against democratically elected politicians doesn't scream protecting democracy to me.
European countries had a working relationship with Erdogan in the beginning because of this. Obviously power corrupted in the end.
It feels like a similar situation with Imran Khan (both did time in prison on politically motivated charges), but I don't know enough about Pakistani politics to be sure.
1. Political institutions in Pakistan are very weak and when things start to truly go bad, people look toward the military to bring law and order and not their elected leaders. This in turn gives the military a seat at the table to impact internal matters and foreign relations.
2. India - using India as a general boogeyman since independence has given the military brass a lot of money and power. They in turn use this to further their political ideology and when things start to go a way they don’t like they can start a coup. In turn the people generally go along with this as they think army control might be better than their leaders to solve their issues.
Like it was mentioned, Pakistan needs a few decades of peaceful democracy to get their shit together. Otherwise it will keep circling the drain of being a failed state.
tl;dw: The powers-that-be in Pakistan -- the army and whichever political dynasty the army favors that day -- routinely overrule the popular vote because they don't believe that democracy will always spit out the best candidate. This is partly due to arrogance but also because the institutions that are supposed to keep a check on harmful populism in Pakistan are broken or corrupt. These powers-that-be have decided that IK is bad for Pakistan (twist: they're probably right about this; IK is a religious fundamentalist and a giveaway socialist in a country that is broke) and have invoked "special measures" to keep his name off the ballot or the ballot away from the people. Understandably, this has angered the people who have taken to the streets.
It seems like a smart choice for a politician who needed to cement his religious status to be viable in an overwhelmingly religious country but wanted to avoid the appearance of insincerity or hypocrisy in cases where he decides not to support conservative religious political policies.
Whether he is a good leader for the country is another matter. He is principled to a fault, which is probably also his downfall. In the world of realpolitik, he probably never stood a chance. It is questionable if he could ever actually carry out his policies, having antagonized practically the entire state apparatus.