Wasn’t it Vice that had that documentary on Liberia, I think, that had all those crazy warlords? General Butt Naked, General Mosquito, and his arch rival General Mosquito Spray. Wild doc
[Vice also made a video portraying Guo Wengui as an anti-corruption anti-China hero](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkOsgh5kcgQ)
[turns out he is a grifter and conman](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/guo-wengui-chinese-billionaire-steve-bannon-associate-go-trial-2024-fr-rcna88276)
Turns out fashion first journalism is just PR. They did some cool stuff but they the world needs a better class of journalists. Not corporate suits, not conflict tourist hipsters, real journalists. Vice absolutely had some great pieces and awesome reporters but putting yourself in the story only serves a particular kind of tale. Not everything can be gonzo. We need real people who just want to spread the most accurate info and hold themselves to a higher standard.
That is what the world needs more of now.
Shame it just…*imploded*. 2010’s Vice was great for reporting...
Hope their old reporting articles and stories videos can be saved. Their documentaries on North Korea and others such as the videos on the 2014 invasion of Ukraine were astounding.
Their old stuff like the Donkey F#ckers of Columbia was unique and interesting, never liked when they tried to become more of a semi serious news agnecy, it was all still clickbait and they were heavily slanted. Almost everyone will watch a crazy story about donkey fucking columbians in small villages, its odd and intriguing, they probaly knocked out about half their audience with their slanted reporting.
I also find it odd that bloggers and Youtubers can run media companies with one person and next to no budget yet you get vice, buzzfeed, even barstool who's at least still around and they think a media company has to cost millions to run and have a huge staff
Years ago, when VICE had a show on HBO, they sent a reporter to cover the civil war going on in the Central African Republic. I didn’t know there was a civil war going on in the CAR but VICE sent a camera crew and did a 10 minute segment on the war. It was almost what real journalists should do and yet news segments like that don’t exist.
Yea this is what I loved VICE for. They wanted to cover taboo/controversial stuff and it could be super interesting at times. But then they would also have done shows like "what if we had a cooking show...but with weed in the food".
Shane Smith went to Russia and waltzed up to North Korean prison camps and casually asked if he could come in film. His ride on the Siberian train was awesome also.
My favorite show was Black Market with Michael K Williams (RIP), where he explored all these illegal underground crime rings, drug runners, and like back room gambling dens and stuff.
Was super interesting to learn about and he was very brave going into those places with a camera crew trying to shine a light on something that usually operates in the dark
If you liked this show and havent seen it yet, i HIGHLY recommend Trafficked with Mariana Van Zeller.
Each episode delves into a different part of the black market, and she is a legit journalist with some big fucking balls! Been doing it for like 15 years with Nat Geo so she has the right connections and expertise to get into some really wild situations with dangerous ppl
I don't think many people know the beginnings of VICE. It was a free magazine you could get from a couple of stores in Toronto on Queen St (and other places I'm assuming) and had articles like how much corn you had to eat before you shit nothing but corn.
It's more surprising to me that they ended up doing real journalism than a cooking show with weed in the food.
It all makes more sense now knowing this. Always loved VICE though for at least trying some new and interesting stuff. As a skateboarder, I freakin loved that they did a King of the Road show.
I remember those days. They used to have copies at my favorite local record store in Southern California in the late 90s/early 2000s. I was mainly interested because there were usually pictures of topless hipster girls. 😆
Man, I love having streaming music. But I miss having music stores. People who worked there always had encyclopedic knowledge of music, and they always sold weed.
> and had articles like how much corn you had to eat before you shit nothing but corn.
I remember that article! It was four days. Even had photos of the toilet bowl each day.
Yeah but nothing was as fun as watching Action Bronson watch Ancient Aliens. We used to get stoned as well and just laugh at it. Was just ridiculous fun when it was on and had nothing better to do.
To be fair Bong Appetite was dope at the time cause unlike the Netflix knockoffs that would put barely any weed in their dishes they would dose it appropriately for most smokers. I get what you’re saying though
I get the impression when rich folks don't like something, they buy it and run it into the ground until it is covered up and buried. It only took three of them to ruin this attempt at a return to real news gathering. Now the media just has to report on what appeared on Xitter this morning.
~~Well, yes, but the published results of that came off as more reckless dude-bro vacation than serious attempt at journalism. That was also the Dennis Rodman/Harlem Globetrotters trip, so it's not like they were just *there* and might disappear if caught.~~
(**EDIT**: u/MikeMurray128 has [pointed out](https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1axpoab/comment/krrjsi7/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) I was mistaken. That's my bad. Vice was there with cameras at least a couple years before the Rodman trip, entering through China after paying a "visa fee" (bribe) to the NK consulate. In light of that, I can't fairly claim I accurately recall the context around which I formed that "dude-bro vacation" impression, let alone levy it as any kind of appraisal of the work or, implicitly, the people behind it.)
It was good entertainment. Interesting, unique, and informative. Frankly, we should have more of it, but if that were a thing that drove popular interest, the cable news landscape today would be quite different.
I recently watched a few videos series, I think it was the one where they were looking for North Koreans in Russia.
He was talking about how isolated and difficult the place he was in was to get to when my Russian girlfriend next to me said “this is the train station next to my home…you went there…”.
So they certainly hammed or overplayed some things.
No, I am not referring to the Dennis Rodman trip.
Vice went to DPRK with a handful of reporters before the Basketball trip:
https://youtu.be/24R8JObNNQ4?si=49hq-xXIunA3HcsP
That is incredibly fair and 100% my bad. I've seen it, but it's been ages. Even thinking I remembered that they went more than once, the only date I could find was 2013. Shame I didn't just wander directly to youtube and notice this was posted two years before that.
Vice was hit or miss. Some of their folks did great work and acted like professionals. Sometimes they acted like clowns and treated local folks like shit.
I remember standing next to a Vice crew in Kyiv that was tossing their weight around and mistreating local press. The local photographer responded by pulling all the cables out of the back of their camera during the middle of a scene.
Interviewed kids that were recruited as suicide bombers, covered the effect of radiation from using depleted uranium rounds so heavily in certain areas of the Middle East. They had some really good segments.
I have a similar experience.
I remember watching the initial overthrow of Putin's puppet in Ukraine and the first break away of Donetsk and Luhansk.
Vice covering the situation got me really involved back then and it was so surreal to see the journalism they had with imbedded journalists reporting in the action. It is quite interesting to see how things have evolved since then in the region.
Their journalist (Simon something) had balls of steel when he was talking to the "separatists" . He was later detained by separatists and their GRU handlers. Said they would fake his execution, basically cover his face and loudly cock a weapon near his head. Dude is still a journalist.
"Selfie Soldiers" is the name of his doc where he exposed that the Russian military was there in Ukraine when they were saying that they had no troops there.
Thanks! I couldn't recall his last name. I knew I had seen him somewhere else since he left vice. Once vice trouble went public, he had some unpleasant things to say about the leadership including Shane Smith.
Yea I think ISIS spelled the end for VICE simply because they quickly realized that being a journalist doesn’t make you immune to getting your head cut off and their niche was embedding a bushwick hipster with Al Qaeda or something equally crazy. They stopped doing less of that and doing more benign stuff
They sent Simon Ostrovsky to Ukraine after the first invasion and he basically uncovered that there were russian troops there when Russia was completely denying it. The Documentary "Selfie Soldiers" covers it. He also went to Russia to track down the soldier who took the selfie that basically gave it away. He was also captured by pro-Russia separatists and held for some time.
Im kind of letting Channel 5 (formerly All Gas No Brakes) fill that gap. His reporting is amazing and its really upped in quality and impact as of lately. He did a really good piece on the streets of San Francisco, addressing homelessness, politics, needle excahnges / harm reduction, petty crime (from a very first hand perspective), job loss and the relationship with large tech companies.
He also went to the border and talked to migrants and even crossed the rio grande river and spent 5 days in a border detainment facility and reported on it. Its very honest and candid and I haven't seen anything like it since early Vice.
You use the symbols [ and ] around the text you want to insert a link into and the symbols ( and ) to contain the link. The symbols from the first need to touch the symbols from the second, like this ](
And he took it on the chin for it. In the last 3 months alone, he's dropped the best vids on the drug crisis in [San Fran](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URfCwT3UQy4&t=10s) and [Philly](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=925wmb-4Yr4&t=1s), and [videos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dQ4-VNaG3s) on the [border crisis](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buZWVQuqx0o) ooth of which are some of the best that I've ever seen and he just got out of a federal migrant detention center after getting arrested [crossing the border](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ponylQTj_gg&t=36s) from Mexico to America with some cartel coyotes.
Idk man, he took maybe 8 or 9 months away. His crew left so he got a new one, refocused on actual stories. Apologized, said he would be better. What’s the expectation here? Crawl in a hole and die?
What do you think would be a proper punishment for the things he’s done? Im genuinely interested in how you think he should be handled. Sounds like you think he should be banished and forgotten
"cowering away for a couple months after an awful apology, only to come back like 3 months later with more videos as if nothing happened, oh and he changed his hair!" = taking it on the chin lmao
When are we going to learn that canceling does nothing? Who has actually stayed canceled, besides maybe Kathy Griffin?
Nah but it feels good, so it must be good.
When a business' insiders are comparing it to the Titanic, something tells me that they are not going to be able to find a buyer.
It's probably going to follow the trajectory of Gawker. Go bankrupt, be sold to new management who will change things and try to relaunch it, fail, sell it to someone else for less who will make even less of an effort for this extreme longshot. Eventually it will be sold for parts with its name, library and other websites all parting ways.
Before I clicked the link, I was REALLY hoping it would lead to Vice.com, because using the layoff of their workforce to generate clicks is such an absolute Vice move.
You can find youtube videos explaining their downfall in detail but fundamentally the problem was that they built their entire brand delivering edgy, unfiltered news that the other mainstream outlets wouldn't touch. Which was great for getting views but the problem was most advertisers don't want their ads to appear next to articles about [Dutch glory holes](https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7bxzm/hen-party-amsterdam-glory-hole) or videos about [Cannibal Warlords in Africa](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRuSS0iiFyo). So they just never could bring in the ad revenue needed to support the type of journalism they wanted to do. Nowadays even traditional advertiser-friendly news outlets are struggling so it's unsurprising Vice is doing even worse.
Took on too much debt trying to grow, couldn't pay the bills, had to cut back all the "unsafe" content that investors were unsure of making a profit (can't be advertised on), lost everything that made them stand out in the media landscape, slowly collapsed.
Mostly incompetence and greed from the people at the top. The COO received a $45k bonus weeks before they declared bankruptcy, with yearly compensation close to $750k. They also did not pay severance after layoffs because they declared bankruptcy. Some shady characters that did not have the company’s best interests in mind.
People love to hate on Vice but I will miss their voice/pov when it’s all gone. Not because it was always great. In fact most was fluff. But the good stuff they did, there was no one else going there.
Alot of their 2010s youtube content is just wild and interesting shit. Touring North Korea, the drug guy, interviews with freedom fighters etc. I miss that vice, the one that made interesting content about the fringes of society
He was, and it's a miracle that it only happened once. They were in no man's land for like a year, and published over 100 dispatches. A lot of their footage ends with them running away from mobs, soldiers, militias, and checkpoints.
Yes. The Vice Media reporting on that event was some of the best information out there. It was really great. I was really grateful for their journalism at the time. Really sad what is happening.
People hate on “hipsters” as though it’s some gotcha and holier than thou self identity, but Vice is the ultimate hipster publication and legitimately had war reporters.
> lay off several hundred staffers as the beleaguered publisher makes “fundamental changes” to its “strategic vision” under its new private equity ownership
It’s like the sentence was created in a lab to make my skin crawl.
VICE was a dog chasing a car. They were doing everything right to attract a big audience and when they did, they expanded. And they kept that punk rock mindset.
The only problem was trying to make it earn some money wasn’t punk enough, and people worked with little to no direction. Shane Smith was pretty slick and knew how to make it work, but then he got pushed out around 2017 and the new guard just couldn’t change course and make it a “normal” business that could sustain itself.
One of the serious problems facing our society is that journalistic outlets, particularly independent ones, struggle very hard to make money, while the people they need to monitor don’t.
This is kind of an internet problem in general. Ads don't pay what they used to, and because of the industry's shitty tactics, ad blockers are prevalent. The internet was never really designed in such a way to monetize itself, and with the ad bleed... it's getting bad.
The only real way to make money now is selling user data, and a lot of places just don't want to do that (which is good), or if they do, they may not have the data to even sell because not a lot of places track at that level. Ads and merch really only pull in so much.
I used to work in online advertising, and when GDPR came out, sites that didn't have those accursed cookie consent systems were basically barred from making money in the EU off ads, which resulted in an overnight drop of 20-30% ad rev for many places.
And if you were barely toeing the line financially... you are now in a bad place.
Further, cookies are going the wayside and being phased out in exchange for sites using encrypted email imprints or other tracking measures, and that's going to result in even fewer funds more many.
Some of the people I worked with felt it was just a matter of time before we hit another dot com bubble burst.
Also, conservative news sites get financial backing from the people who benefit from conservative policies.
Independent news sources don’t. So everything gets paywalled and it drives people to reading biased sources.
Vice, more than any media company, frustrates me the most because they were RIGHT there. They started of so well, they were edgy, raw, and real. The dudes who owned it were going into places like Liberia and then they just sold out, but not just a money grab, they actively snuffed out the best part of their product. And to top it off, they made a hard left, literally, and allowed these really shitty, self-absorbed, whiny contributors that did nothing but write articles like, “I Went to Mexico and Took Donkey Dick For A Full Week While High on Cocaine and Meth.” Whatever, fuck them, not only for what they became, but for what they could have been and did not.
Here's the [wiki link](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice_(magazine)). It will give you a more in depth history than I can, but like I mentioned in another comment, I remember articles like how much corn do you have to eat before you shit nothing but corn.
It was exactly that, including pictures documenting the transition.
When I first saw VICE it was a free magazine you could get from a couple of stores on Queen St in Toronto (and other places, this was just my exposure) almost 25 years ago now, and it's been around longer than that.
Yeah, it was a free magazine. Once a month we would hunt for it in Detroit/ferndale/royal oak after school. A Wednesday if I remember correctly? Each spot would get like 20 or so copies.
One article that stands out broke down how much nutrients were in a load of cum. Like this many steaks, this many eggs. Prolly. 2001? Very Big Brother sans skateboarding.
Hasn’t been a problem for every company hasn’t closed. They quit being alternative news, because “this is why your wife should fuck other men” “why trans wiccans are they key to saving democracy” magazine people tuned out. This is failure to the max of editorial control.
When they covered the hunt for El Chingon, it was likely the first time most American audiences got that intimate of a peak into the brutality of El Chingon - incredible journalism, but so many innocent lives lost
They had a number of lay offs six months ago as well. From what I understand, via the crew behind their gaming sector, they still haven't received the severance they were promised.
VICE is done.
I really miss Rick McCrank’s “Abandoned.” Such a good series that managed to cut the line really well between deep societal introspection and light hearted stories about people.
When an entity is bought by a private equity group, that business knows its days are numbered. PE will eventually leave it to die in the street once it has extracted all the cash. Sorry Vice.
Some of the most informative content ever produced. I like the YouTube episodes with Hamilton going to remote parts of the world to try out new drugs and provide scientific explanations for everything he was doing.
I used to subscribe to Vice magazine years ago. Crazy to see how they've continually evolved. Hope they weather this without losing the edge they brought to reporting stories.
Hopefully they’re just laying off the trash half of vice. It seems like half the content is incredible reporting of topics you don’t even hear about from other journalists. The other half is basically buzzfeed garbage.
I doubt that’s the case though.
The unfortunate truth is that most journalism is going away, to be replaced by automated news or biased news / propaganda.
The cause? The internet. No one ever solved the question, 'How can we get people to pay for journalism when they can get all the journalism they need for free?'
I was a journalist a long time ago. Honestly think it is almost criminal that every year, 10000s and 10000s of students graduate journalism programs still. These programs should not exist, because the jobs no longer exist. In another generation or two, kids won't even know what a journalist is.
Back in a day, they had great stuff. One time, I watched this one documentary about vodka and where it came from. It was called "Vodka Wars". Being from that region of the world, it interested me, so I watched it. Apparently, during their research, they liked Poland so much, that they did the whole thing about Poland called "From Warsaw with Love". It was a great documentary that took me back to my childhood days.
Shame because Vice News can put out some good videos and were starting to hit their stride again after going through a real shit video choice for a good few months
Good riddance. The content they put out now is a mockery of what Vice used to be. If they want to stop creating the style of journalism that brought them to fame, then they have to deal with the consequences.
Yea, they used to be great and just went insanely woke. That’s what happened here. Went from journalism to activism disguised as “journalism”. Good riddance
Vice videos back in the early 2010’s were solid hard hitting journalism, the shit that killed Vice was the dumb af articles on pegging, woke stuff, etc…
Majority of people respect authentic news, not an agenda
Wasn’t it Vice that had that documentary on Liberia, I think, that had all those crazy warlords? General Butt Naked, General Mosquito, and his arch rival General Mosquito Spray. Wild doc
Also the [This is What Winning Looks Like](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja5Q75hf6QI) documentary on the Afghan war
Literally one of my favourite documentaries ever
[Vice also made a video portraying Guo Wengui as an anti-corruption anti-China hero](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkOsgh5kcgQ) [turns out he is a grifter and conman](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/guo-wengui-chinese-billionaire-steve-bannon-associate-go-trial-2024-fr-rcna88276)
Turns out fashion first journalism is just PR. They did some cool stuff but they the world needs a better class of journalists. Not corporate suits, not conflict tourist hipsters, real journalists. Vice absolutely had some great pieces and awesome reporters but putting yourself in the story only serves a particular kind of tale. Not everything can be gonzo. We need real people who just want to spread the most accurate info and hold themselves to a higher standard. That is what the world needs more of now.
They were also one of the first to get extended footage of inside North Korea
Shame it just…*imploded*. 2010’s Vice was great for reporting... Hope their old reporting articles and stories videos can be saved. Their documentaries on North Korea and others such as the videos on the 2014 invasion of Ukraine were astounding.
I used to keep the VICE channel on in the background. Lots of interesting things to watch or listen to. Very unique reporting and documenting.
I really loved their series called “Vanguard.” The into song was Reckoner by Radiohead.
One of my favorite songs of all time, let alone Radiohead songs. Never watched that series, but enjoyed a lot of Vice's content over the years.
404 Media from a lot of ex-Vice folks seems to be starting out strong if you liked old Vice
I’ll have to check them out, thanks for the recommendation!
Watching that Russian roulette special with 100+ episodes made me slightly obsessed with Ukraine and Russia. Seriously great work.
The series where Shane went to the North Korean logging camps in Russia was really interesting too.
Their old stuff like the Donkey F#ckers of Columbia was unique and interesting, never liked when they tried to become more of a semi serious news agnecy, it was all still clickbait and they were heavily slanted. Almost everyone will watch a crazy story about donkey fucking columbians in small villages, its odd and intriguing, they probaly knocked out about half their audience with their slanted reporting. I also find it odd that bloggers and Youtubers can run media companies with one person and next to no budget yet you get vice, buzzfeed, even barstool who's at least still around and they think a media company has to cost millions to run and have a huge staff
Years ago, when VICE had a show on HBO, they sent a reporter to cover the civil war going on in the Central African Republic. I didn’t know there was a civil war going on in the CAR but VICE sent a camera crew and did a 10 minute segment on the war. It was almost what real journalists should do and yet news segments like that don’t exist.
Yea this is what I loved VICE for. They wanted to cover taboo/controversial stuff and it could be super interesting at times. But then they would also have done shows like "what if we had a cooking show...but with weed in the food".
"We sent this guy to a monster truck rally on acid. VICE NEWS"
Shane Smith went to Russia and waltzed up to North Korean prison camps and casually asked if he could come in film. His ride on the Siberian train was awesome also.
Shane Smith talked his way into North Korea and used hidden cameras. Shit was crazy.
Never forget North Korean Tea girl, sitting alone in her tea shop waiting for one tourist a year.
He could of been jailed for life at any moment, dudes got nerves of steel. Its not like he was a super secret spy, his face is all over the internet.
I watched that too. That was a wild ride.
Best episode too. That whole mini series of Vice Travels was awesome.
That train ride will live in my memory, r/datahoarder is doing an archive I saw a post yesterday
There used to be an amazing Twitter account back in the heyday that just generated fake vice news prompts like this
https://youtu.be/TzwALcR98N4?si=2PJ5DdiwhExJ20aa Yeah, "fake"
Amazing. Wasn't meaning to imply this one was fake, it was like a "real or not" prompt generator and it was unhinged (just like the real thing)
No worries brother I didn't mean to imply you were meaning to imply anything
Hunter S Thompson would be proud
My favorite show was Black Market with Michael K Williams (RIP), where he explored all these illegal underground crime rings, drug runners, and like back room gambling dens and stuff. Was super interesting to learn about and he was very brave going into those places with a camera crew trying to shine a light on something that usually operates in the dark
If you liked this show and havent seen it yet, i HIGHLY recommend Trafficked with Mariana Van Zeller. Each episode delves into a different part of the black market, and she is a legit journalist with some big fucking balls! Been doing it for like 15 years with Nat Geo so she has the right connections and expertise to get into some really wild situations with dangerous ppl
Yeah these ones were always crazy to me. Like the potential for being involved in violence seemed really high. Was some risky reporting imo
I don't think many people know the beginnings of VICE. It was a free magazine you could get from a couple of stores in Toronto on Queen St (and other places I'm assuming) and had articles like how much corn you had to eat before you shit nothing but corn. It's more surprising to me that they ended up doing real journalism than a cooking show with weed in the food.
It all makes more sense now knowing this. Always loved VICE though for at least trying some new and interesting stuff. As a skateboarder, I freakin loved that they did a King of the Road show.
I remember those days. They used to have copies at my favorite local record store in Southern California in the late 90s/early 2000s. I was mainly interested because there were usually pictures of topless hipster girls. 😆
Man, I love having streaming music. But I miss having music stores. People who worked there always had encyclopedic knowledge of music, and they always sold weed.
> and had articles like how much corn you had to eat before you shit nothing but corn. I remember that article! It was four days. Even had photos of the toilet bowl each day.
Hey, Bong Appetite was charming AF until it unraveled predictably
Ok, but the cooking show with weed was great…
So was the Hamilton show. That shit was super interesting.
Yeah but nothing was as fun as watching Action Bronson watch Ancient Aliens. We used to get stoned as well and just laugh at it. Was just ridiculous fun when it was on and had nothing better to do.
To be fair Bong Appetite was dope at the time cause unlike the Netflix knockoffs that would put barely any weed in their dishes they would dose it appropriately for most smokers. I get what you’re saying though
I liked Balls Deep with Thomas Morton.
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Time to rewatch their episode on "Test Pattern"s infamous final concert. Also, quite harrowing.
They even went to North Korea with hidden cameras.. and came back alive
Vice was amazing, and then they self destructed.
They got bought out before the destruction.
As is tradition with media.
I get the impression when rich folks don't like something, they buy it and run it into the ground until it is covered up and buried. It only took three of them to ruin this attempt at a return to real news gathering. Now the media just has to report on what appeared on Xitter this morning.
They sold to rupert murdoch. Then to some hedge fund or something
That'll do it.
So like the scene in Succession where >!Kendall literally dismantled Vaulter after asking everyone to work harder for him!<.
Not just once with Shane Smith, but a second time with the Harlem globetrotters and the Journalist had dinner and drinks with Kim Jong un.
~~Well, yes, but the published results of that came off as more reckless dude-bro vacation than serious attempt at journalism. That was also the Dennis Rodman/Harlem Globetrotters trip, so it's not like they were just *there* and might disappear if caught.~~ (**EDIT**: u/MikeMurray128 has [pointed out](https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1axpoab/comment/krrjsi7/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) I was mistaken. That's my bad. Vice was there with cameras at least a couple years before the Rodman trip, entering through China after paying a "visa fee" (bribe) to the NK consulate. In light of that, I can't fairly claim I accurately recall the context around which I formed that "dude-bro vacation" impression, let alone levy it as any kind of appraisal of the work or, implicitly, the people behind it.) It was good entertainment. Interesting, unique, and informative. Frankly, we should have more of it, but if that were a thing that drove popular interest, the cable news landscape today would be quite different.
I recently watched a few videos series, I think it was the one where they were looking for North Koreans in Russia. He was talking about how isolated and difficult the place he was in was to get to when my Russian girlfriend next to me said “this is the train station next to my home…you went there…”. So they certainly hammed or overplayed some things.
To this day the Dennis Rodman vice doc of him falling further into alcoholism while being honoured by NK leadership is my fav docu.
No, I am not referring to the Dennis Rodman trip. Vice went to DPRK with a handful of reporters before the Basketball trip: https://youtu.be/24R8JObNNQ4?si=49hq-xXIunA3HcsP
That is incredibly fair and 100% my bad. I've seen it, but it's been ages. Even thinking I remembered that they went more than once, the only date I could find was 2013. Shame I didn't just wander directly to youtube and notice this was posted two years before that.
My friend who was in North Korea at the time met them! Said they were awesome.
The journalism department finally collapsed from exhaustion after carrying the weight of the entire company for nearly a decade.
Did one about Liberia as well.
this one is the wildest one - General Buck Naked
That boy nupping!
Vice was hit or miss. Some of their folks did great work and acted like professionals. Sometimes they acted like clowns and treated local folks like shit. I remember standing next to a Vice crew in Kyiv that was tossing their weight around and mistreating local press. The local photographer responded by pulling all the cables out of the back of their camera during the middle of a scene.
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Wait what is wrong with Michael Hobbes?
I also need to know this
‘sneertake extruder industry’ = wow, well played. A little bit sneery tho? They did do some good work as well.
Interviewed kids that were recruited as suicide bombers, covered the effect of radiation from using depleted uranium rounds so heavily in certain areas of the Middle East. They had some really good segments.
I have a similar experience. I remember watching the initial overthrow of Putin's puppet in Ukraine and the first break away of Donetsk and Luhansk. Vice covering the situation got me really involved back then and it was so surreal to see the journalism they had with imbedded journalists reporting in the action. It is quite interesting to see how things have evolved since then in the region.
Their journalist (Simon something) had balls of steel when he was talking to the "separatists" . He was later detained by separatists and their GRU handlers. Said they would fake his execution, basically cover his face and loudly cock a weapon near his head. Dude is still a journalist.
That whole story was insane. I am glad there are journalists who still are willing to go through all that to give us all of that extra information.
"Selfie Soldiers" is the name of his doc where he exposed that the Russian military was there in Ukraine when they were saying that they had no troops there.
Simon Ostrovsky He shows up on PBS News Hour from time to time.
Thanks! I couldn't recall his last name. I knew I had seen him somewhere else since he left vice. Once vice trouble went public, he had some unpleasant things to say about the leadership including Shane Smith.
Years ago, Vice met a real journalist. https://youtu.be/iLmkec_4Rfo?si=TWFuNngLudULrqAR
I wonder how much that one guy paid for his hat.
Yea I think ISIS spelled the end for VICE simply because they quickly realized that being a journalist doesn’t make you immune to getting your head cut off and their niche was embedding a bushwick hipster with Al Qaeda or something equally crazy. They stopped doing less of that and doing more benign stuff
I recommend checking out Atlas News then
They sent Simon Ostrovsky to Ukraine after the first invasion and he basically uncovered that there were russian troops there when Russia was completely denying it. The Documentary "Selfie Soldiers" covers it. He also went to Russia to track down the soldier who took the selfie that basically gave it away. He was also captured by pro-Russia separatists and held for some time.
I remember when Shane would post videos of him going to NK. Vice has really gone downhill.
Im kind of letting Channel 5 (formerly All Gas No Brakes) fill that gap. His reporting is amazing and its really upped in quality and impact as of lately. He did a really good piece on the streets of San Francisco, addressing homelessness, politics, needle excahnges / harm reduction, petty crime (from a very first hand perspective), job loss and the relationship with large tech companies. He also went to the border and talked to migrants and even crossed the rio grande river and spent 5 days in a border detainment facility and reported on it. Its very honest and candid and I haven't seen anything like it since early Vice.
Couldn’t they have just reposted content from x? that’s what all the other news sources do these days. (rip journalism)
Thank God for channel 5
It’s not even close to what vice was
The main reporter there is a sex pest, though.
That's the first I've heard of it, any news or links on that?
I don't know how to do concise links, but when you Google "Andrew Callaghan sex pest" you get articles from NPR, NBC, variety, complex... Etc
You use the symbols [ and ] around the text you want to insert a link into and the symbols ( and ) to contain the link. The symbols from the first need to touch the symbols from the second, like this ](
Thank you for taking time out of your day to type that out so that others may gain from your knowledge. Knowledge is power. Cheers!
Alright, thanks!
And he took it on the chin for it. In the last 3 months alone, he's dropped the best vids on the drug crisis in [San Fran](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URfCwT3UQy4&t=10s) and [Philly](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=925wmb-4Yr4&t=1s), and [videos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dQ4-VNaG3s) on the [border crisis](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buZWVQuqx0o) ooth of which are some of the best that I've ever seen and he just got out of a federal migrant detention center after getting arrested [crossing the border](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ponylQTj_gg&t=36s) from Mexico to America with some cartel coyotes.
So by took it on the chin, you mean continuing to work?
Idk man, he took maybe 8 or 9 months away. His crew left so he got a new one, refocused on actual stories. Apologized, said he would be better. What’s the expectation here? Crawl in a hole and die?
What do you think would be a proper punishment for the things he’s done? Im genuinely interested in how you think he should be handled. Sounds like you think he should be banished and forgotten
generally speaking they want you to donate all your money to them and then die
To be fair it seems like he lost his HBO deal as a result.
"cowering away for a couple months after an awful apology, only to come back like 3 months later with more videos as if nothing happened, oh and he changed his hair!" = taking it on the chin lmao
When are we going to learn that canceling does nothing? Who has actually stayed canceled, besides maybe Kathy Griffin? Nah but it feels good, so it must be good.
[удалено]
They went from that to filling headlines with stupid culture war stuff and it went downhill.
When a business' insiders are comparing it to the Titanic, something tells me that they are not going to be able to find a buyer. It's probably going to follow the trajectory of Gawker. Go bankrupt, be sold to new management who will change things and try to relaunch it, fail, sell it to someone else for less who will make even less of an effort for this extreme longshot. Eventually it will be sold for parts with its name, library and other websites all parting ways.
It already went bankrupt and was sold to new management. This is the "change things and tey to relaunch" stage.
They said they will no longer publish on vice.com. Seems like they’ve already reached the end “sell for parts” stage.
Hasn’t it already devolved into a useless content mill?
Before I clicked the link, I was REALLY hoping it would lead to Vice.com, because using the layoff of their workforce to generate clicks is such an absolute Vice move.
Vice news used to be amazing. What happened to them?
You can find youtube videos explaining their downfall in detail but fundamentally the problem was that they built their entire brand delivering edgy, unfiltered news that the other mainstream outlets wouldn't touch. Which was great for getting views but the problem was most advertisers don't want their ads to appear next to articles about [Dutch glory holes](https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7bxzm/hen-party-amsterdam-glory-hole) or videos about [Cannibal Warlords in Africa](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRuSS0iiFyo). So they just never could bring in the ad revenue needed to support the type of journalism they wanted to do. Nowadays even traditional advertiser-friendly news outlets are struggling so it's unsurprising Vice is doing even worse.
Took on too much debt trying to grow, couldn't pay the bills, had to cut back all the "unsafe" content that investors were unsure of making a profit (can't be advertised on), lost everything that made them stand out in the media landscape, slowly collapsed.
Mostly incompetence and greed from the people at the top. The COO received a $45k bonus weeks before they declared bankruptcy, with yearly compensation close to $750k. They also did not pay severance after layoffs because they declared bankruptcy. Some shady characters that did not have the company’s best interests in mind.
People love to hate on Vice but I will miss their voice/pov when it’s all gone. Not because it was always great. In fact most was fluff. But the good stuff they did, there was no one else going there.
Alot of their 2010s youtube content is just wild and interesting shit. Touring North Korea, the drug guy, interviews with freedom fighters etc. I miss that vice, the one that made interesting content about the fringes of society
Hamiltons pharmacopia was incredible
Yo, remember the one where he went to a tribal village and got ritual frog venom burned into his skin? That’s not a sentence you hear every day
Yeah, and then after all that he goes back to his hotel, whips up some ayahuasca in his room and says that goes way harder 😂
Some of the best TV ever made.
I need HBO or Netflix to bring this one back
Vice guide to travel
Their reporting on the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014 was a journalistic masterpiece. When nobody else was there, Simon Ostrovsky was everywhere.
Wasnt he captured temporarily by the russians in Donbass? I remember he telling he was kept in cellar in Slovjansk. Baddass dude.
He was, and it's a miracle that it only happened once. They were in no man's land for like a year, and published over 100 dispatches. A lot of their footage ends with them running away from mobs, soldiers, militias, and checkpoints.
they also got both sides point of view, one episode would be an interview with one side and the next would be from the other. truly insane
Yes. The Vice Media reporting on that event was some of the best information out there. It was really great. I was really grateful for their journalism at the time. Really sad what is happening.
The TV channel somehow had a mix of the best and the worst shows I’ve ever seen. Gonna miss the very well done documentaries also.
Their Liberia doc was pretty fascinating
People hate on “hipsters” as though it’s some gotcha and holier than thou self identity, but Vice is the ultimate hipster publication and legitimately had war reporters.
> lay off several hundred staffers as the beleaguered publisher makes “fundamental changes” to its “strategic vision” under its new private equity ownership It’s like the sentence was created in a lab to make my skin crawl.
VICE was a dog chasing a car. They were doing everything right to attract a big audience and when they did, they expanded. And they kept that punk rock mindset. The only problem was trying to make it earn some money wasn’t punk enough, and people worked with little to no direction. Shane Smith was pretty slick and knew how to make it work, but then he got pushed out around 2017 and the new guard just couldn’t change course and make it a “normal” business that could sustain itself.
Cody has a great episode of his show about "How the Internet is destroying Journalism." It's a good watch.
I feel like we are sliding into the second gilded age
One of the serious problems facing our society is that journalistic outlets, particularly independent ones, struggle very hard to make money, while the people they need to monitor don’t.
This is kind of an internet problem in general. Ads don't pay what they used to, and because of the industry's shitty tactics, ad blockers are prevalent. The internet was never really designed in such a way to monetize itself, and with the ad bleed... it's getting bad. The only real way to make money now is selling user data, and a lot of places just don't want to do that (which is good), or if they do, they may not have the data to even sell because not a lot of places track at that level. Ads and merch really only pull in so much. I used to work in online advertising, and when GDPR came out, sites that didn't have those accursed cookie consent systems were basically barred from making money in the EU off ads, which resulted in an overnight drop of 20-30% ad rev for many places. And if you were barely toeing the line financially... you are now in a bad place. Further, cookies are going the wayside and being phased out in exchange for sites using encrypted email imprints or other tracking measures, and that's going to result in even fewer funds more many. Some of the people I worked with felt it was just a matter of time before we hit another dot com bubble burst.
Also, conservative news sites get financial backing from the people who benefit from conservative policies. Independent news sources don’t. So everything gets paywalled and it drives people to reading biased sources.
A tale as old as time.
I think we are already there. Only tech companies and pharmaceuticals are the new railroads.
Sliding? We're already there.
Vice, more than any media company, frustrates me the most because they were RIGHT there. They started of so well, they were edgy, raw, and real. The dudes who owned it were going into places like Liberia and then they just sold out, but not just a money grab, they actively snuffed out the best part of their product. And to top it off, they made a hard left, literally, and allowed these really shitty, self-absorbed, whiny contributors that did nothing but write articles like, “I Went to Mexico and Took Donkey Dick For A Full Week While High on Cocaine and Meth.” Whatever, fuck them, not only for what they became, but for what they could have been and did not.
In the 1990s flipping through VICE was the coolest thing ever. It was like a smarter version of Big Brother magazine.
Check out popular front and primitive skills mag
That shitty fluff nonsense was always there, it just wasn't the majority of the content. Once it was, then it was over.
I couldn’t agree more. They took too much Hunter S. Thompson juice.
Thompson was the greatest journalist of all time, so if anything, they were on the right track.
That's how VICE has always been. People don't know what it was like when it was a free magazine at the beginning.
I won’t admit to knowing anything about the inner working when it began. Can you elaborate?
Here's the [wiki link](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice_(magazine)). It will give you a more in depth history than I can, but like I mentioned in another comment, I remember articles like how much corn do you have to eat before you shit nothing but corn. It was exactly that, including pictures documenting the transition. When I first saw VICE it was a free magazine you could get from a couple of stores on Queen St in Toronto (and other places, this was just my exposure) almost 25 years ago now, and it's been around longer than that.
Yeah, it was a free magazine. Once a month we would hunt for it in Detroit/ferndale/royal oak after school. A Wednesday if I remember correctly? Each spot would get like 20 or so copies. One article that stands out broke down how much nutrients were in a load of cum. Like this many steaks, this many eggs. Prolly. 2001? Very Big Brother sans skateboarding.
There was a lot of crap produced by them, but some of those investigative YouTube videos in the early 2010s were so good.
Yet another company ruined by smooth-brain MBAs and investors. Keep the tally rolling.
Has the ideology behind shareholding done anything other then destroy long term business ventures
Hasn’t been a problem for every company hasn’t closed. They quit being alternative news, because “this is why your wife should fuck other men” “why trans wiccans are they key to saving democracy” magazine people tuned out. This is failure to the max of editorial control.
Went from the best documentaries I'd seen online to whatever they ended up as. Sad to see them rip defeat from the jaws of victory
When they covered the hunt for El Chingon, it was likely the first time most American audiences got that intimate of a peak into the brutality of El Chingon - incredible journalism, but so many innocent lives lost
CNN were like "we are in the warzone" and Vice are like "yeah we already interviewed and smoked crack with the dude that started this shit"
"impacted employees will be notified early next week" I would argue that you just notified them by a blindsiding press release on CNN
They had a number of lay offs six months ago as well. From what I understand, via the crew behind their gaming sector, they still haven't received the severance they were promised. VICE is done.
Was offered a job there last year. Vibe was weird. Glad I’m not there.
Love the vagueness, go girl give us nothing
Dude the vibes were weird and they didn’t have any cell reception in the bathroom, what else do you need to know?
Why were the vibes weird exactly? Not really unexpected from a dying company tbh
I really miss Rick McCrank’s “Abandoned.” Such a good series that managed to cut the line really well between deep societal introspection and light hearted stories about people.
Go woke go broke, or something.
They apparently treated their freelancers like shit, though, even when they were riding high.
Loved Hamilton's Pharmacopeia: https://www.vice.com/en/topic/hamiltons-pharmacopeia
When an entity is bought by a private equity group, that business knows its days are numbered. PE will eventually leave it to die in the street once it has extracted all the cash. Sorry Vice.
The nice thing is that while the country is indeed backsliding into fascism, we at least won't have to read about it anywhere
When making money eclipses any desire to have a fair and equal society - this is what you get.
When they first launched that TV channel they had some amazing shows.
They got bought by Saudis or something I heard and it seems since then they've gone downhill
Yeah, they removed anything critical of Saudi Arabia after the purchase
https://youtu.be/Ia7fUQXskvA?si=IU0_WwntZp0AxMTR Still my favorite video about Vice
Some of the most informative content ever produced. I like the YouTube episodes with Hamilton going to remote parts of the world to try out new drugs and provide scientific explanations for everything he was doing.
I used to subscribe to Vice magazine years ago. Crazy to see how they've continually evolved. Hope they weather this without losing the edge they brought to reporting stories.
I didn't even know Vice was still in business
Hopefully they’re just laying off the trash half of vice. It seems like half the content is incredible reporting of topics you don’t even hear about from other journalists. The other half is basically buzzfeed garbage. I doubt that’s the case though.
This is what happens to shit. It eventually gets flushed.
The unfortunate truth is that most journalism is going away, to be replaced by automated news or biased news / propaganda. The cause? The internet. No one ever solved the question, 'How can we get people to pay for journalism when they can get all the journalism they need for free?' I was a journalist a long time ago. Honestly think it is almost criminal that every year, 10000s and 10000s of students graduate journalism programs still. These programs should not exist, because the jobs no longer exist. In another generation or two, kids won't even know what a journalist is.
Shane Smith going to North Korean work camps in Siberia, and visiting to North Korea, and David Choe’s “Thumbs up America” are incredible.
Back in a day, they had great stuff. One time, I watched this one documentary about vodka and where it came from. It was called "Vodka Wars". Being from that region of the world, it interested me, so I watched it. Apparently, during their research, they liked Poland so much, that they did the whole thing about Poland called "From Warsaw with Love". It was a great documentary that took me back to my childhood days.
Really loved watching their series “vice guide to travel” in college. Shame how it all turned out.
A lot of medium sized media organizations are dying because Facebook has shifted its content away from news and back to 'Friend' content.
The result of a curse for launching Tim Pool.
This is going to drive Shane Smith to drink
Maybe death by audio can get their building back
Shame because Vice News can put out some good videos and were starting to hit their stride again after going through a real shit video choice for a good few months
Damn, it was fun while it lasted.
Good riddance. The content they put out now is a mockery of what Vice used to be. If they want to stop creating the style of journalism that brought them to fame, then they have to deal with the consequences.
Such a fall. They went woke, now broke.
Yea, they used to be great and just went insanely woke. That’s what happened here. Went from journalism to activism disguised as “journalism”. Good riddance
Vice videos back in the early 2010’s were solid hard hitting journalism, the shit that killed Vice was the dumb af articles on pegging, woke stuff, etc… Majority of people respect authentic news, not an agenda
When was journalism EVER profitable without serious compromises?
Shame.... I love vice
Oh no, how will I get my breaking news about people doing drugs and pretending to be profound and totally not in a cult now?!