Vice surrenders

🌈 Abstract

The article discusses the rise and fall of Vice Media, a Canadian media company that transitioned from a hipster-led startup to a corporate-owned entity. It highlights how Vice's reporters continued to produce high-quality work despite the company's increasingly incompetent leadership and worsening conditions. The article also criticizes Vice's new strategy of abandoning its website in favor of publishing on social media platforms, which the author sees as a risky and short-sighted move.

🙋 Q&A

[01] Vice Media's History and Downfall

1. What were the key factors that contributed to Vice Media's downfall?

• Vice Media was founded by a group of hipsters, one of whom later became a prominent fascism influencer.
• The company was acquired by a series of increasingly dishonest and predatory corporate owners.
• Vice enthusiastically embraced Facebook's "pivot to video" strategy, which ended up destroying half the media industry.
• Vice convinced larger media companies to invest heavily in the company, despite its declining performance.
• The company's leadership paid themselves high salaries while cutting resources and tools for its journalists.

2. How did Vice's reporters continue to produce high-quality work despite the company's problems?

• Even as Vice's leadership was mismanaging the company, its reporters continued to turn out stellar material.
• They did this while facing worsening conditions, such as delayed payments to key suppliers and having to pay out of pocket for research tools.
• Several Vice veterans who left the company before its collapse went on to found a successful writer-owned investigative news publisher, 404 Media.

[02] Vice's New Social Media-Focused Strategy

1. What is the author's view on Vice's new strategy of abandoning its website in favor of publishing on social media platforms?

• The author sees this as a risky and short-sighted move, arguing that the social media business model is a "giant rug-pull" where platforms encourage media companies to become reliant on them, only to then charge those companies to reach their own audiences.
• The author suggests that this is the moment for media companies to adopt a "POSSE" (Post Own Site, Share Everywhere) strategy, where social media is used to bring readers to channels that the company controls, rather than becoming dependent on third-party platforms.
• The author criticizes Vice's private equity owners for pursuing this social media-focused strategy, arguing that they lack the strategic insight to effectively "turn around" a media company that produces high-quality, successful work.