Fascinating history. Still, I couldn’t help but notice the evolution of how Vice News’ audience was described as the article progressed:

Young people, who had always been disregarded as news consumers, were enraptured by the hard-edged, thrilling content from the worst places on Earth ….

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.

Vice’s original YouTube fanbase, which skewed young male and often hard-Right

Bored young men who want to see brutal images of combat

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.

Vice News was the future, once. If even they can’t make hard foreign news pay, then perhaps it has no future.

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!

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 “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.

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!