[SyneRyder]

Quoting Vice in that article, defending journalists:

"many journalistic outlets are increasingly moving away from an ad-based revenue model driven by traffic, and instead ... optioning their articles to movie studios ..."

Emphasis mine, but I can't believe Vice admits their business model is creating stories they can turn into Hollywood films. That doesn't align with reporting the truth. "Never let the facts get in the way of a good story".

But that does explain a lot. Bloomberg's "The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies" was totally unsubstantiated garbage, but it does sound like a plotline from a Hollywood movie.

[secondcoming]

The only part of Vice that's worth giving the benefit of the doubt when it comes to The Truth is their Motherboard section. The rest has been tripe for a few years. There was a glimmer of hope with Simon Ostrovsky's reporting from Ukraine, but he seems to have moved on.

[topicseed]

True. Though the bottom line is publishers saying "we need to get money somehow", and readers mostly not enthused by paying for a subscription. So if it's not ads and the often-paired click bait, it has to be something else, itself paired with something else.

I definitely do not condone that, especially for outlets present to inform the general public, but they're businesses after all.