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Roussinos reports for duty in 2018
A decade ago, as a young war reporter for Vice News, I had the nagging feeling that one day I’d find my wizened older self, like an old NME journalist droning on about punk, reminiscing about the time when we brash millennial upstarts had the world of TV newsgathering at our feet. But I never expected it to be so soon.
The young get old and revolutions end up eating their own: and the death of the flagship Vice News Tonight show and drastic downsizing of the Vice News platform, just days after the closing of Buzzfeed News, heralds the closing of the era when the New York new media giants bestrode the news world like strutting conquerors. With the heavily indebted Vice empire reportedly circling on the edge of bankruptcy, and struggling to find a buyer, the media landscape of the 2010s already looks like history. As Ben Judah observed: “The early 2010s were a moment where Buzzfeed News and Vice News gave you the impression you didn’t have to do journalism like The New York Times or the BBC. Them shuttering is telling us, actually, there’s only the way they do it at The New York Times and the BBC.”
Back then, the world looked very different. When the Vice News channel launched on YouTube in 2014, its parent company’s reputation for achingly arch and semi-ironically offensive content aimed at jaded hipsters caused legacy broadcasters to scoff at the idea of their cocky, inexperienced journalists challenging them on their own turf. Within months, their laughter stopped: networks such as the BBC and CNN were now terrified that Vice held the key to the future of news. Vice News went where no one else would go, gaining access to the most difficult stories, and throwing itself into the thickest action with studied indifference. Young people, who had always been disregarded as news consumers, were enraptured by the hard-edged, thrilling content from the worst places on Earth; elderly execs and money men threw sponsorship at the company in an attempt to capture some of the magic for their own ailing brands. The future of news was young and online, and there was no going back.
Historians of the craft of newsgathering will record that Vice News changed the visual grammar of the medium. By marrying a cinematic visual style with the tempo and immediacy of breaking stories, and pioneering the use of handheld DSLR cameras, Vice News re-aestheticised TV news. And by having its young reporters talk casually to the audience, like friends, in the middle of the world’s worst chaos, the old world of buttoned-up correspondents stiffly lecturing the camera suddenly looked like a relic from the age of black and white. But while the big networks quickly learned to copy Vice’s style to the point it has become the norm, the fundamental challenge of all news broadcasting — how to make the most difficult and expensive content on Earth pay for itself — had still not been solved. In the end, it was all a mirage.
As is the nature of the trade, it was always a source of pride, and of glittering awards, to obtain better combat footage than anyone else: always getting closer to the action, dancing at the edge of death like a gladiator in the amphitheatre for the audience’s thrill and delectation. The highest word of praise from an exec was “gnarly”. But what neither fans nor critics of what they saw as our recklessness understood was that the “bang-bang” was merely a vehicle with which to smuggle in serious analytical reportage of poorly-understood conflicts and revolutions. Vice’s central insight was that if you framed the story right, and shot it well enough, you could persuade teens and early twentysomethings to watch in-depth explorations of Syrian rebel justice systems, or the intricacies of South Sudan’s civil war. Middle-aged execs from traditional networks had always claimed young people didn’t care about granular detail, or distant wars in Africa: but this (apart from stories about drugs) was always by far the most popular content, judging from YouTube views and comments. The audience never demands dumbing-down: viewers want nuance, shades of grey, and moral ambiguity. They want to see the world as it is, not as it ought to be.
While the rewards in the early days were mismatched to the risk, the degree of experience offered to young journalists was unrivalled, a huge draw to those with an adventurous streak. Journalists at the beginning of their careers were given access to stories the networks reserved for their hardened veterans, and repaid that trust with a fervid dedication to their craft. I was a green 31-year-old reporter when I started, with only the Libyan war, Tunisian revolution and a strange months-long sojourn with tribal rebels in Sudan under my belt. Vice gave me the freedom to follow the Malian army into bloody battle against jihadist rebels, experience the Egyptian coup from the Islamist side, return to Syria over and over again during the course of the war and follow the Isis story from their initially underplayed rise to their final desert gotterdammerung.
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SubscribeIt seems the formula for financial success in the modern media is find an outraged audience (or create one) then feed it red meat (works for the NYT, The Guardian, and, until recently, Fox News).
Unherd consistently provides excellent journalism but that’s mainly because it’s supported by a wealthy businessman. Long may his largesse continue.
The Free Press has shown that the subscriber model can be very successful, but it too plays to the bias of its readers. Audience capture is an issue for any news outlet that doesn’t derive the bulk of its revenue from advertising, which is basically everyone now. I think it’s okay to be left wing or right wing, you just have to be honest about it, do good work and don’t pretend to be unbiased.
Problem is though, that taxpayer funded broadcasters like bbc do not reflect majority opinion in the country.
They are all peddling woke, lefty agendas.
They should be defunded.
It is extremely unlikely that woke youngsters would be willing to pay for bbc subscriptions.
So why should older demographics pay for journalism working against its interests?
Fascinating history. Still, I couldn’t help but notice the evolution of how Vice News’ audience was described as the article progressed:
As Aris’ personal story arc goes from starry-eyed youngster to grizzled veteran, we see Vice’s audience – the same people – go from being enraptured youths with a thirst for nuance to merely bored conservative males who want to be titillated.
Aris’ article seems to accidentally echo the fate of Vice itself. A bunch of liberals agreed to take huge risks for nearly no pay because they thought that by doing so they were uplifting the global youth with weighty reporting on the left’s favourite demographic (poor people in countries far away). “Just a wild, idealistic time”, as they said.
At some point it must have become clear that their audience wasn’t really all young people (who mostly lived up to their reputation for not caring) but rather only the male right-wing subset – the sort of people young leftists hate the most. Reading between the lines we might infer that many of them were Trump supporters too. So Vice promptly abandoned their modestly winning formula and pivoted to fighting over the same audience all the other journalists were also fighting for, but they had no edge there and when money got expensive again VC funding dried up. Their collapse followed soon after.
The oddest thing is the conclusion.
But did Vice ever even try? The article is notable for what’s not there: any discussion of trying to make money from the original audience. The first time we hear about making money, it’s years later and Vice is selling liberal comfort food to traditional TV channels.
I don’t actually think “hard foreign news” can ever pay – Aris is right about that. Fundamentally the world is local, despite cheap air travel. Foreign news almost never impacts people’s lives in any way, especially not in America which is big and well insulated from events elsewhere. The war in Syria has a small impact on Europeans when refugees turn up, but by and large most people can cut their consumption of foreign news to zero and never even notice. Indeed, why should people pay for that? Why would anyone ever think they would? Most news agencies drastically over-weight foreign news for exactly the reasons Aris lays out here: journalists love it and so by agreeing to subsidize it with the revenues from more local news, they can underpay. What’s missing in salaries is made up for with excitement and awards ceremonies.
But if it can be made to pay, it will be by selling to it to right wing men, those unusual people who truly desire to see the world as it is and not as it ought to be. The staff at Vice may not want those people as their customers, but somewhere, someone does. Chin up!
Do not trust the news. They spoon feed what they believe you should know in order to think how they do. The legacy versions owned by plutocrats are the worst.
In 2016 we learnt that class war had come back to the West and the media had to choose sides. Vice chose the wrong side and became just another mouthpiece for Wall Street globalism.
The future is small IMO. Keep costs down, don’t waste money on expensive extras and devote your energy to producing quality news. Adverting no longer drives the business. Subscribers do.
The “semi-ironically offensive content” in Vice of a decade ago just seemed (and still seems) jaded, fratboyish, complacent, self-satisfied: not much more than a rehash of early P J O’Rourke or lazier 70s Playboy “think-pieces”. That was absolutely not part of its then genuine strengths.
Compare and contrast the sometimes genuinely (and well beyond semi-ironic) shocking content that was contained in the 1990s Moscow-based “eXile” – It is still notable how that truly outrageous publication blooded Matt Taibbi, very well, for covering and understanding the subsequent degeneration of US political and social life. I can imagine that living in the anarchy of the Soviet collapse would bring about a rapid realisation of the naiveity and delusion of cherished liberal ideals about human nature, too.
So, in its best content – and the embedding with Isis certainly counts for that – Vice’s foreign news content truly was worth something for a time. Grim realities need to be shown.
Unfortunately, the news has morphed completely into entertainment and I am not really sure it will ever be different. Spin, lying, and obfuscation are the norm and that is why I don’t trust a damn thing in any commercial media outlet. There are wonderful spin-offs like UnHerd, Substack, and Spectator with differing views and good discussions, like it used to be. There are always the shills, but they are easily outed. The worm may be turning but MONEY trumps all these days and until it doesn’t, we are stuck in this nightmare.
Seems like Vice went to the Dark Side – money. Chasing the almighty dollar meant going to the mass media/Cable giants and coincidentally, keeping the leftward bias. Unsurprisingly, Vice became CBS Evening News.
Bye!
Did I miss something? Buzzfeed is right wing, what? Aren’t these the geezers who without any real verification published the Steel ”Dossier” garbage. They’re a biased organization who couldn’t see their own bias, that’s obvious from this overly long article. Think Vice think Leftists, “Dispassionate” you’ve got to be joking. Don’t know what this article is on about.