I do. Was it all good? Certainly not. But they tried to get some money into actual journalism instead of just doing a presentation layer filled with copy paste.
That's a tough problem in this day and age of reader-paid news simply not happening. That's not happening not only because we are so greedy, it's also not happening because we certainly don't want to get back to only reading that one paper we happen to be subscribers of, as it used to be before the web.
We desperately need a "spotify for news", preferably with a two tier setup that allows a "play" of something investigative to have more weight than simple news agency copypasta. And preferably not with a central giant gatekeeper squeezing content suppliers as hard as possible but as a bottom-up coop, with reverse syndication (subscribers of A get elevated guest access at B and subscribers at B get guest at A) that redistributes a percentage of subscription revenue according to the spotify model (play/read counts). But as long as that doesn't exist, Vice was the closest thing we had to get post-print journalism funded.
Almost every closure of a real news outlet is a loss to society as a shrinking news market means stronger echo chambers and narrower reporting. Vice does some good reporting and in areas that others won't or only glaze over. Basically, variety & competition matters.
>Almost every closure of a real news outlet is a loss to society
(X)
Only if they are good outlets. The loss of Gawkers was absolutely a net positive to society for example. Vice used to be absurdly good, mind you, but that was 10-15 years ago at best. There may not be that much of a loss here either, like Gawker.
On the other hand, if stuff like AP, Reuters, or CS Monitor closed down, THAT would be an actual loss. Those people actually still do good investigative journalism now and then.
They've had some really good content... sensationalist, maybe, but focusing on interesting parts of life few other publications would touch. For that insight I am grateful.
In January 2017 they (Motherboard) published a long and detailed article (translated from Das Magazin) about how Cambridge Analytica had used Facebook data to help get Trump elected, somthing I thought was important for everyone to know about. A year later bigger media "revealed" the same information and it became big news around the world.
The whoe Cambridge Analytica story was one of the major steps in the descent of the media into partisan ragebait, though. Political campaigns have long had a much more boring but effective way of getting the data they need to get out the vote which mostly boils down to asking people (and of course recording the results in a database). The Trump campaign seems to have seen the Cambridge Analytica data as a worse alternative to the traditional approach if the Republican Party didn't give access to their own, long-running voter database. The basis for their personality analysis was pseudoscience and I think it was apparently even tested and didn't work that well. That reporting was less about informing people that it was delegitimising an election result that many people didn't like by blaming a website that many journalists didn't like because it had siphoned advertising money away from them.
For bonus partisan points, the previous Obama campaign had used people's Facebook interactions for voter targetting in a way that was ethically fishy, and this was spun as a clever and positive thing. Imagine if some of your friends were secretly siphoning off all your social media interactions with them into a political party algorithm that decided which of the people they talked to could be most effectively convinced to vote Obama - that's basically how their system worked, and it got glowing coverage after the fact in places like the New York Times that boasted about how effective it could be for commercial advertising too.
That's a tough problem in this day and age of reader-paid news simply not happening. That's not happening not only because we are so greedy, it's also not happening because we certainly don't want to get back to only reading that one paper we happen to be subscribers of, as it used to be before the web.
We desperately need a "spotify for news", preferably with a two tier setup that allows a "play" of something investigative to have more weight than simple news agency copypasta. And preferably not with a central giant gatekeeper squeezing content suppliers as hard as possible but as a bottom-up coop, with reverse syndication (subscribers of A get elevated guest access at B and subscribers at B get guest at A) that redistributes a percentage of subscription revenue according to the spotify model (play/read counts). But as long as that doesn't exist, Vice was the closest thing we had to get post-print journalism funded.