Posting a previous comment on a Vice-related article because it’s relevant here;
Vice Media has several issues;
1) The founder, Shane Smith, was over ambitious and raised over $1 billion, which is just too much for a media firm. This is not a software business with high margins to justify such capital.
2) Vice transformed from an edgy content company producing cool stuff like a documentary about the Liberian cannibal warlord and a trip to North Korean labor camp and became just another mainstream liberal/left-leaning news outlet; the problem is there’s no shortage of such outlets, so Vice lost what made it unique.
The good thing about the kind of edgy content Vice produced is that it cut across all political spectrums and across different countries, meaning a larger audience. Anecdote is I and my friends (from Nigeria) used to watch Vice shows but have stopped due to shoving US politics down our throats.
What will likely happen is that Vice will end up selling for scraps. But note that Shane Smith already sold $100 million+ worth of shares [1], so he’ll be fine regardless.
I used to love vice's provocative and borderline offensive articles. The french version had that satiric and extremely spicy "war of classes" vibe some other french publications such as charlie hebo had and it was a delight. (cf this one if you can translate it: https://www.vice.com/fr/article/avbv55/le-guide-vice-pour-pe...)
However for the past 10 years I go see their home page once a year and I physically cringe and how boring / washed up all the articles are. I don't think there is a better example of go woke go broke if the story is true.
> raised over $1 billion, which is just too much for a media firm. This is not a software business with high margins to justify such capital.
I'll bite. Why is it too much? This sum could be spent on purchasing smaller, struggling media companies covering various niches, or companies unrelated to media, to bootstrap a conglomerate.
They raised $1 billion at a valuation of up to $5.7 billion. That means the likely exit outcome for investors was an initial public offering (IPO).
But media margins are thin, and any media company will find it hard to make enough profit to justify a valuation above $5.7 billion...the few exceptions are the ones that take decades to grow so big, e.g., Fox Corp and Disney...the conglomerates as you said but this takes a long time to build, longer than VCs can wait for their returns.
Vice made $600 million in revenue in 2018 and earned no profit [1]. If it hit the public markets with those results, its stock will sink into oblivion. Tech companies get high valuations even without profitability because the software business is high margin and investors have hope that they'll become profitable in the future. It's not the same for media companies...the industry outlook is bleak, so there's no greater fool to sell to.
You raise the money and you have to deliver. And media, esp. things like news, have thin margins.
I don't know what the going rate is these days but I recall numbers like $0.2 – $2.5 per 1,000 views. Meaning you need to get, and maintain, lots and lots of clicks. Which means lowest common denominator clickbate, while simultaneously not being too edgy and scaring off advertisers. And it's a deep, busy market, so you've got tons of competition, too.
So throwing $1B at it is kind of overkill; it'll be ages before you ever get it back, and it locks you into a race-to-the-bottom market that's incredibly fickle. You coulda put that into a tech startup, or S&P 500 index fund, etc. for less risk and less BS.
When they lost their quirky uniqueness, they lost their relevance. What's the difference between Vice today and Salon, Huffpo, etc? They become one of an interchangeable crowd.
I think Vice peaked around the time they put out This Is What Winning Looks Like. I haven't seen any media from Vice as compelling as that since then.
I would not equate the two. Salon and Huffpo were just clickbait farms, almost from Day 1. They had some interesting pieces from time to time, but nothing I ever thought of as particularly unique.
Vice produced (and still does some times) some incredible pieces because they were able to get access to people who were otherwise inaccessible… or it required a level or risk that is simply unacceptable.
I just came back to this thread because there’s an interview that just got posted a few hours ago with Maria Lvova-Belova IN Russia and it’s wild.
I don't understand why Vice is hated here so much. Yes, they have dopey "stoner" content, like Buzzfeed did with their vapid original content. But like Buzzfeed, they have been doing serious journalism, getting unique interviews with heads of state, adversaries, and in war zones.
Just today, they released this interview in Moscow with the Russian lady wanted by the International Criminal Court for deporting kids from Ukraine: https://youtu.be/Ei4xLdv2gYE
Among other good ones involving Ukraine, Russia, Taliban, etc.
Thanks for sharing these links. I just watched one of them and it is some great reporting.
Problem with vice is that they have been mixing serious reporting with trash, jackass plain nonsense. I remember this going on since the first time i encountered the print magazine. It seems as they are just aiming for the crass, no matter if there was substance of not and it ruined them in the end- rightfully so.
> mixing serious reporting with trash, jackass plain nonsense
That has been their modus operandi from almost day one, though.
I just think they haven't figured the financing out. These reportings are still quite expensive, they don't want to go subscription-based, and when you look at the view counts, they are not that big really. You cannot finance all that just from YouTube ads, as the money then mosty go to Google.
Vice Motherboard has been a really good check on the tech industry. A lot of the rest of Vice has always been trashy and exploitative, but it's had an unexpectedly big impact, as well -- much like BuzzFeed News.
God that’s a trashy article - that’s Cosmo-level stuff. The bit where the woman being interviewed is like making fun of micro penises and guys who shave their pubes?? Grow up, come on.
Also I am 100% confident that I could pick every ex partner’s dick out of a lineup. It’s crazy that you wouldn’t be able to, like - you’ve had your hands on it. You’ve had it in your face, you’ve been up close and personal with it - how could you not recognize it after the fact?? What’s the point of sleeping with a guy if you don’t pay any attention to his dick?
It's just the people. They were able to find some truly amazing journalists. Isobel Yeung has put herself into truly insanely dangerous situations to get a unique story time and time again.
Yep. Vice just released an interview with Isobel in Moscow harshly questioning the Ukrainian child deportation Russian wanted by the International Criminal Court.
I do not understand how she is still alive. IMO she may be the most interesting person alive. Not even hyperbole. With all the places she's been and things she's seen… I can't even imagine. I'm amazed how calm and collected she always seems to be.
Vice was a purposefully edgy fashion magazine for a few years before pivoting to their understanding of what journalism should be. I think it stayed as a fashion magazine.
Treat your audience like idiots who must be shouted down at and you'll lose that audience fast. And that's a shame because interspersed with all the trendy woke messaging there was actually a lot of good. My favourites were the Scott Dozier death row interview and the "One Star Reviews" series.
Eh, demagogues do it all the time, talking about how undisciplined people have become, even going as far as saying deliberately offensive things or curse words on national TV, and yet they get popular support all the same.
People aren’t necessarily proud. They just have their biases and they would love for a certain type of person or entity to berate them.
The last few recent VICE/Vice News clips I've watched on youtube seemed like the visual content was predominately AI-selected stock footage ~loosely related to the words being narrated.
Those instances basically were just audio narrations with borderline pointless visuals you may as well just be listening to. The narrator might be talking about a particular invasion of a specific country for instance, and the visuals are just showing some random war footage and you're left wondering if this is even from the present day let alone the right country/invasion etc. It's totally strange. Can't cost very much to produce though...
FFS, how did I miss this? Considering how counter culture Vice was early on it felt quite left wing.
Does every fringe political thing wrap around? In other words if you move super far to the left, do you end up wrapping back around on the right wing? Is the connection libertarian or authoritarian, anarchist, fascist or what?
I posit that the effect is real (see sibling comment about "horseshoe theory"), but that framing it as "wrap around" incorrectly centers the discussion on a single left-right axis. There are several other axes that govern how people interact with issues (personal life issues, societal issues, and politics as a subset). In my experiences, among the most common are three dispositional axes:
- Is their focus on making things better, or on keeping things from getting worse?
- What is their regard for institutions and/or expertise?
- Are they attracted to, or turned off by, a framing that relies on scalar hyperbole: "the worst its ever been", etc.?
A person can shift around "on the issues", viewed purely as left-right, while still remaining true to themself on these dispositional axes.
There is a framework I recognize as similar put forward by Arnold Kling that I think of often, the Three Languages of Politics, that suggests part of what makes political discourse so often fruitless is that the primary value axes differ for three major political interest groups:
Conservatives: Civilization vs. Barbarism
Libertarians: Freedom vs. Coercion
Progressives: Oppressors vs. the Oppressed
His thesis was that polarization has been increasing because there is often no natural policy alignment across these axes, even while many would probably agree on some fundamental Western tenets of rights and justice.
Does the framework cover capitalism, socialism, or the economic left? The Overton window is bigger than the three interest groups listed. The groups are all centre[-left] or right wing.
There is policy alignment historically. We can look to how the Nordic countries or Mass and then America dealt with health care in modern times.
The right was cool with Mass “universal healthcare”. Liberals were not. Then when Obama did what Romney did in Mass, it suddenly became a liberal viewpoint and the Overton window moved to the right.
This has issues with “no natural policy alignment” imo.
I didn't read the book; it was written prior to 2013 when I heard him on a podcast conversation. Parts of it stuck with me, and I remember there being a more recent followup:
Ah. I’m viewing all this in 2023. I tried skimming the talks. It doesn’t cover leftism. It covers liberals, conservatives, and libertarians. I see the site, Cato Institute, and the author are all libertarians.
The topic is missing 1/3 to 1/2 of the Overton window and regularly conflates a made up “left” that doesn’t exist. Of course the left exists. Liberals are not the left.
I searched a few basic topics and many results [and comments] lacked awareness of socioeconomic knowledge. Sometimes defiantly so.
Meanwhile when I go and look at the [far] left, they are likely to be honest with their good faith intentions of agitation and propaganda.
Thanks for the links.
Edit: the problem isnt leaving out the left. The problem is leaving out the importance of the left and how “progressives” can’t be used alongside conservative and libertarian. It would be similar to giving a thesis on basketball with a “3 position” stance. Small forward (progressive), guard, guard (the other two). Crude example but this sort of sports book would be utterly trashed for being anti-intellectual and pedantic.
Studying political science, I have a hard time on this. Do we have any [modern] examples of far left moving over?
I agree with personal issues. What is the difference between societal and politic issues?
This topic is liberals founding a media company and one of them already being a controversial liberal who was scratched revealed and went mask off as a fascist. A cliche.
Good job at finding a framework with your Qs! An issue is they are vague. I tried answering your questions and they don’t answer what my politics or principles are.
I wonder if the perfect combo is to include policy questions along w/ some steel-manning. The current questions don’t take the Overton window in consideration. Anecdotal, I have yet to see someone’s [future] politics without hearing their policy ideas.
> A person can shift around "on the issues", viewed purely as left-right, while still remaining true to themself on these dispositional axes.
I’m still curious to what end any of this? What is it showing for people in general? Personally I would gain nothing about knowing someone’s principles or politics from those questions.
Finally the one thing that is entirely left out is capitalism. What left right are we discussing? Where does believing in capitalism lie on this? Without being specific and steel manning, people of every political disposition will sometimes answer the questions the same.
Maybe “left versus right” is too simplistic of a mental model and we obscure important information about political beliefs trying to shoehorn everything into a single, arbitrary dimension?
Yes. We have been conditioned to think of politics as a linear thing where the sum of beliefs fit nicely in a point between a set point on the left and a set point on the right. In reality it’s so much more complex and really depends on the relative point in a more dimensional political space that you are peering at them from…
For instance—I see such huge parallels between today’s progressive left and the “moral majority” types that I really can’t functionally separate them but for the gods and scriptures driving the moralities that they preach. At least from the perspective I see them from, which is probably best described as “classic liberalism”, they are essentially identical. It’s also the reason that both of those movements tended to view classical liberalism as anathematic. Their perspective seems to be is that intolerance of outside beliefs and thoughts except their own is their most important quality, so they work to suppress.
Are you talking about progressive left that are socially that way or more? Morality isn’t really part of the economic left (which includes social Justice).
I agree liberals and “moral majority” (which are one and the same really) are similar.
Since the convo is left vs right, do you have any opinions on people on the left who aren’t liberals? They don’t sound like the two groups you discussed.
I personally don’t have any of my views suppressed in a number of communities (not HN of course hah)
This implies Vice media was some kind of far leftist media company. It’s not it’s just a bit edgy and punk. I think they try stay away from politics (as much as its possible).
GenX alternative subculture in North America in the 90s & early 2000s was very apolitical. It was oppositional to the mainstream but didn't really do so around 'issues' so much as aesthetics and a general hatred for the mainstream. As someone who was quite openly (far) left wing at the time, I felt very much in the minority.
Yes there were anarchist political punks, etc but it wasn't really the focus.
I don't recall finding VICE in the late 90s, early 2000s to be political at all. It was just snarky and sometimes funny. "Dos and Don'ts" etc.
Then again, I don't really recognize what Americans call "left wing" now as "left wing."
I think it depends a lot on what you think of as "left wing". They were also known for "a top-down ethos of male entitlement at Vice, where women said they felt like just another party favor at an organization where partying often was an extension of the job": https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/24/vice-founders-apologize-fo...
Nothing to do with me. Just noticing that when a company makes loud statements about equity then they’re inevitably accused of a toxic work environment. Last notable example was npm inc a few years ago. You’ve probably noticed the same.
One continue name calling and referring to me as say conceited. Or find some fallacy. Instead of understanding it is not big deal but reactionary is clearly about reacting to political progress.
1. Cambridge agrees with Oxford and me and the rest aren't credible sources. As Oxford and Cambridge say, reactionary is reacting to political change, not to exclusively left wing change.
2. I didn't call you names or say you were conceited.
3. More to the point: why are you responding on different threads? I clearly do not wish to communicate with you and the only reason I'm seeing this is because blocks don't work on mobile. Please stop.
Besides your own personal beliefs as to who is biased and impartial, why?
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/react...
Page says:
"a person who is opposed to political or social change or new ideas:
Reactionaries are preventing reforms.
SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases
Custom, tradition & conformity
Americanization anti-classical anti-conventional anti-institutional anti-traditional conventionalized conventionally crowd custom demi-monde multicultural multiculturalism multiculturally non-classical non-conservative ultra-conservatism ultra-conservative ultra-traditional unconventional unconventionally"
> not to exclusively left wing change
The above speaks for itself.
> 3. More to the point: why are you responding on different threads?
My post included:
> I notice you're the same who mistakenly provided a simplified and thus incorrect definition of reactionary.
Nope, Vice media is a capitalist corporation, so no it was never left wing. It makes sense that an edgy founder of a capitalist corp. could go far to the right, as that is acceptably within the system that preserves private wealth.
Perhaps by left wing you meant liberal. There are some (very few) examples of rich people that became class traitors, Engels was one, but usually they have some distance (e.g. via inheritance, as with Engels) from how the money was made.
> Does every fringe political thing wrap around? In other words if you move super far to the left, do you end up wrapping back around on the right wing?
That’s how the Proud Boys were created - as a response to Antifa violence.
I looked for 30 min. I found no evidence from my own searching and asking some new media acquaintances. No one can show me where Gavin and Proud Boys was started by any [far] leftist or involved any far leftists.
In fact I can’t even find Vice being created by a single far leftist.
I also only found one or two sources denying that Proud Boys is not [far] right wing. Including sympathizers.
Do you have any knowledge on what type of [far] leftist Gavin or any Proud Boy was?
Also perhaps I’m not as knowledgeable. How is it wrapping around if different people are reacting? Antifa is about anti fascism. It isn’t about being far left. Antifa isn’t only anarchist or communist.
Any information you or any one else has would help me a ton. Id love to add this topic to my substack. But I don’t want to repeat what you wrote without it making sense.
> No one can show me where Gavin and Proud Boys was started by any [far] leftist or involved any far leftists.
Nobody is claiming this. It seems like you didn’t read the comment you’re replying to.
> Antifa is about anti fascism.
And the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a democratic republic run by its people. Sometimes things have a meaning that goes beyond how they would like to be perceived.
> other words if you move super far to the left, do you end up wrapping back around on the right wing?
> That’s how the Proud Boys were created - as a response to Antifa violence.
You quoted something talking about wrapping around. However you talked about being reactionary. Being reactionary isn’t wrapping around any more. It goes one way since the left and right wing paradigms were established in the 1700s (or since power/hierarchies first formed between people).
Reactionary is reacting to power and tradition. Which is what antifa is. However it’s not what Proud Boys are. It’s a negative thing aka reactionary create a powerful reaction or response to a leftist decentralized minor movement.
I have studied political science and helped on a paper on reactionaries so I got carried away assuming you meant reactionaries can go from far left to far right or even talking about reactionaries. Also I assumed you were talking politically in a political discussion.
> Sometimes things have a meaning that goes beyond how they would like to be perceived.
And sometimes they don’t have meaning beyond. The example you gave is correct, yes.
Also what does antifa mean beyond anti fascist and what I described above?
—
> Also perhaps I’m not as knowledgeable? How is it wrapping around if different people are reacting. Antifa is about anti fascism. It isn’t about being far left. Antifa isn’t only anarchist or communist.
You didn’t respond to any of this. I wrote 3 lines about antifa. You responded to one.
I also specifically asked:
> …How is it wrapping
My entire issue and explanation was about the way you wrote what you wrote. Too much vagueness when responding to wrapping around being the discussion.
While you didn’t respond to any questions or concerns. I have revolutionary optimistic however so I still give you the respect of a full laid out response.
Using violence against people that disagree with your politics, or people that attempt to document your authoritarian violence is not “reacting to power”. It is power. You know this. I know you know this. Let’s not pretend otherwise.
You don’t need to ask me what antifa is beyond ‘fighting fascism’. You know that too. Stop pretending you don’t or that you’re being respectful, it’s very clear you’re not. You understand the DPRK analogy. You know who antifa is. You’re too intelligent not to.
This is “negative”, or as normal people would put it, bad. If you think using words like “negative” makes for intelligent discourse, you’re not correct. Likewise mentioning your ‘studies’ is still the ‘appeal to authority’ logical fallacy.
Honestly judging by ‘studies’ (not degree) and ‘I have revolutionary optimism’ I feel like you’re in high school.
There’s a great chrome extension that lets you block people on hacker news. You’ll think I’m going to use it because your arguments are strong, but I’m using it because they are weak.
> Using violence against people that disagree with your politics, or people that attempt to document your authoritarian violence is not “reacting to power”. It is power. You know this. I know you know this. Let’s not pretend otherwise.
Who is saying otherwise?? are you equating me with Antifa or something? You keep pretending I believe I’m so smart. I don’t think I am. I believe I’m a lumpenprole. I know what I know. Nothing more
I don’t know what you keep saying about me. Do you enjoy appealing to the status quo or centrism or moderation or civility?
So like I was saying to my audience:
Some people don’t understand what reactionary means…some people think communism isn’t reactionary. Then again those people typically don’t know what communism is. Nor socialism. Usually they don’t have much education outside the Global North or other privileges.
The appeal to authority fallacy is only valid if I’m asking someone to believe me because I have authority. I’m asking others to be at my level and understand what words mean. So I don’t have to talk down to them.
Alas, on you go. Also fallacies are a fallacy. It sounds like I’m talking to a techbro of VC bro or petit bourgeoisie.
> You’ll think I’m going to use it because your arguments are strong, but I’m using it because they are weak.
You are. You are pretending that one group of violent morons you like is not reactionary, and the other group of violent morons you dislike are reactionary. The definition of reactionary is at: https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/americ...
> Are you equating me with Antifa
Yes.
> The appeal to authority fallacy is only valid if I’m asking someone to believe me because I have authority.
You write in pseudo-academic speak and mention your "studies"
> So like I was saying to my audience
This conversation is from two days ago. I'm your only audience.
> It sounds like I’m talking to a techbro of VC bro or petit bourgeoisie.
I'm not sure why you equate non-extremism with "techbro" or "VC bro".
I’ll respond to this later. This person couldn’t stick to their threat of blocking me.
Nonetheless we can learn from this that centrists can not see their own perspective.
They related me with antifa. What? That might be the silliest thing ever. Antifa?? I barely know what it is.
Notice they went to a mainstream dictionary for the definition of reactionary. Not a non American imperialist influenced source. Though likely Wikipedia I assume would provide the same correct pol sci concept for reactionary.
So often we see people on HN or Reddit get so close to understanding the concept but they miss it even while reading the definition.
One major issue is their incessant need to be correct. Their worldview can’t possibly be incorrect. To crack that is to crack society.
To finalize a point to stop incorrect false information.
This user chose to quote one specific generic dictionary just to try to be right when they are not political commentators yet insult any one else who is.
Mixed in with many insults.
Look up most other definitions for reactionary. Not even [advanced] political science only. The Google built in dictionary says
> “adjective
(of a person or a set of views) opposing political or social liberalization or reform.
"reactionary attitudes toward women's rights"
Nobody has insulted you. The Oxford English Dictionary is one of the oldest most authoritative dictionaries in the world, you should learn about it. Enjoy the block.
It really was a different thing back then. Ironic sarcastic hipster Y2k sardonic stuff that was floating around in the milieux when I was in my 20s, VICE was a big part of it. It looked to me like they took a completely different, better, trajectory at some point, and when I looked again at them it seemed like an entirely different, more earnest, organization.
Yes, it was some of the best reporting in the conflict by Simon Ostrovsky who’s now at PBS (https://www.simonostrovsky.com/). His material and access to people from both sides of the conflict was without equal.
How are they running errands? In that interview, Isobel is right up to the line of the questions and tone a journalist in Moscow is able to ask without ending up in prison. And despite Maria preparing for it, the interview further illuminates the truth that Maria is full of shit, coming off terrible and deflecting.
Yeah Crimea isn’t Russian territory. Thank you for understanding why imperialism and colonialism is wrong.
It’s so annoying when Global North people think occupied stolen land is fine!!
Some people still to this day believe Hawaii and Puerto Rico and every other territory the US holds is American territory like Crimea is Russian.
Thank you so much for understanding the point isn’t to single out Russia. It’s to see how the entire Global North thrives by less violently colonizing and stealing resources, people, and territory from the rest of the world.
Vice was good as long as it was edgy. But now a days it is mostly far left progressive trash which you can read on Buzzfeed, NYT and 15 other major outlets.
I still really like Vice News, but they do a lot less investigative pieces that are on the ground. Their reporting on Ukraine in 2014/15, Syria and even North Korea were top notch. I hope at least the News portion is bought up by Axios or someone. Vice itself, I could do without. It hasn't been relevant in a long time and is mostly just living on rage clicks. Like BuzzFeed, it felt like just adding "News" to a brand that largely wasn't actually "News" was a mistake. You'd got to vice.com and it would be a heap of trash, but go to "vicenews.com" (now just redirects to a section of Vice) and you'll get much better content.
For instance, on vicenews.com now you see "Ukraine Is Now Using Steam Decks to Control Machine Gun Turrets" which is interesting...then on vice.com you have "Ring In #MasturbationMay With MysteryVibe's Massive Sex Toy Sale"...what is this mix? Why did they do this? vice.com is also full of stoner content, it's wild.
I was never much of a VICE follower, but their This Is What Winning Looks Like [0] special on the US' war in Afghanistan seemed like pretty solid journalism.
Wish they'd continue producing content like that... Hamilton's Pharmacopeia was fun as well.
Sad to see, I remember being hooked to their early work. I’ll occasionally watch Vice News which is still good. On the ground, on or near the front lines of a conflict zone, has always been there sweet spot.
Is there at this point money in even modestly expensive investigative journalism? Getting people there, having them spend some time on site with all the work involved, to produce what one piece week or a month? Will that sort of content garner return?
While on other side, you can rewrite AP or Reuters. Pick some twitter post. Or just throw stuff at AI... Or sit in relatively cheap office and talk to microphone producing hours of content a day. While people throw money at you and sponsors pay for you selling out...
For the past 6 years, there has been a sustained effort by big tech to push publishers out of business in favor of influencers, so I won't be shocked if a group of "inestigative influencers" fill the gap
Vice had (has?) a very interesting monetisation model, which didn’t rely on typical advertising or subscriptions
they essentially conjured an image of “coolness” to the end of selling sponsorships to megacorps. so they’d go and sneak into North Korea or meet a transgender Ecuadorean meth dealer and it’d be sponsored for a shocking amount of money by—say—Microsoft or Heineken thinking that cool millennials would hop on board
quite innovative for journalism as far as I know, but I suspect the return on investment was pretty poor
Vice used to be cool around the 2010's. I got the monthly magazine in our local American Apparel store for free and absolutely loved the edgy stories, photos and interviews. But after Shane left, Vice became another boring Buzzfeed clone. It was another example of the sad truth that nothing good lasts forever.
If LLMs reduce the "middle class able to support news websites via its ad spending" enough, sending these people in despair and/or lower paying jobs, they willl indirectly remove the support for such reporting anyway.
Local reporting is the most important, as far as what people reading/seeing/hearing it can meaningfully act on, and it's already all but dead thanks to the Internet and smartphones making competition for attention a global enterprise 24/7/365 no matter where a person is.
The honest AI-only papers will admit they are not the primary source on the ground.
As for the dishonest ones, it's not a new problem (only the scale will be new), since fake news are widespread already. The society combats it by a reputation system. I take a BBC war correspondent seriously, but a random military-blogger I never heard of I take less seriously.
I’m assuming that you’re implying that their job is hard news, but you’re hard pressed to find any hard news organizations any more. The AP survives because they sell to other news outlets. Other hard news outlets seem to survive on donations and government funding.
most publications are just writing opinions these days, and almost none of them know what "investigative journalism" actually means anymore as most of their staff spends time on Twitter to spit bullshit day and night. They were dead 10 years ago already.
This. Proper investigative journalism is the only kind of reporting you can't just replace with an LLM/AI, and your only differentiator in an internet filled with copy and paste stories.
Any outlet that neglects it for the usual opinion pieces and soft news coverage is competing with every clickbait content farm out there, without the low operating costs to make it worth it.
The Verge is a Vice publication. It’s the same company. If Vice goes bankrupt so does The Verge and to be frank I think more people on HN are familiar with The Verge than they are Vice.
A bias would imply that they were irrationally negative about Elon for something outside of his control. E.g., maybe they didn't like people with E names, so they were also mean about Emilio Estevez.
But I think at this point Musk has enough of a track record that people can be rationally negative about him. No journalist is obliged to obliterate their memory each day. They're allowed to remember what he's done in the past and interpret new events in light of that. Indeed, keeping better track than their readers and using that knowledge to inform is basically their job.
Dark Side of the Ring was freakin' awesome. At least they had the foresight to run away with that. But every freakin' promo about something marijuana related was tiresome.
Waypoint was lost. Good gaming media is like a big water droplet that keeps on getting smushed by a the big dumb thumb of capitalism. It still shifts to a new spot, but ever diminishing. One of the rare ones that even made money. Still, gone.
Vice Media has several issues;
1) The founder, Shane Smith, was over ambitious and raised over $1 billion, which is just too much for a media firm. This is not a software business with high margins to justify such capital.
2) Vice transformed from an edgy content company producing cool stuff like a documentary about the Liberian cannibal warlord and a trip to North Korean labor camp and became just another mainstream liberal/left-leaning news outlet; the problem is there’s no shortage of such outlets, so Vice lost what made it unique.
The good thing about the kind of edgy content Vice produced is that it cut across all political spectrums and across different countries, meaning a larger audience. Anecdote is I and my friends (from Nigeria) used to watch Vice shows but have stopped due to shoving US politics down our throats.
What will likely happen is that Vice will end up selling for scraps. But note that Shane Smith already sold $100 million+ worth of shares [1], so he’ll be fine regardless.
1- https://www.semafor.com/article/03/19/2023/shane-smith-made-...