"Village crumblеs to ground, Lava Man retreats."
Vice is no more. What, exactly, *was* Vice?
This week’s soundtrack: Sleep - “Hot Lava Man”
I’ve worked in the B2G (business-to-government, a variation of B2B, business-to-business) media world for 17 years now, a full third of my life. I’ve two degrees in journalism and this was never where I saw myself in middle age while I was studying at J School.
Indeed, very few – if any – people of my Mizzou classmate or my American University graduate school classmates would’ve ever said “B2G is a goal of mine” and exactly none of the coursework tackled it. I don’t anticipate any of the coursework – 20 and 15 years out, respectively – deals with B2G media now. It’s no one’s goal and I wasn’t trained for it.
Except I kinda was… because the principles remain the same. Mizzou is a very vocational journalism school – and that’s why it’s such a good journalism program – because its students learn by doing and doing and doing. The principles I learned there in the early part of this century are the same exact principles – my favorite being that Prof. Fred Vultee always told us that a news headline should imply “YOU MUST READ THIS STORY” – that I impart on our writers at GovCIO Media and Research: Inverted pyramid, the five Ws, journalistic storytelling, writing a tight lede, etc.
The business of B2G media is similar to the legacy media giants and the changes I’ve seen in my career have, if not applied perfectly, ported well from the big kids in legacy to the big (and small) kids in niche or B2G media. Events became a bigger moneymaker when print died, social media became a driver, etc. Everything kind of ports over.
Additionally, the things that I learned in Econ 1 at Mizzou are part of the simply economics of every business, including the media business. And the things we all kind of know about late American capitalism are also true.
In a conversation today, I was talking with a friend about the B2B space. She was telling aa story about a very silly answer given when asked – by the way, a normal question that a consultant would ask – where do you see the organization in five years? It’s a question about growth, mostly, but it also opens the door to very silly answers. I’ll paraphrase, but the org’s chief told said “We want to be a movie superhero.”
This answer, of course, is ridiculous, but it also doesn’t answer the question. If I ask you “How do I get to the store?” and you say “follow your dreams,” that’s a bad and wrong answer, but at least it has the word “follow” in it. This motherfucker was like “I deal with governments and data and I want to be Batman” or whatever. That’s not even in the same damned galaxy.
Vice Media, despite itself, put out a lot of great work. Across its platforms and across a few decades, Vice went from being a Canadian punk rock magazine for culture to a billion-dollar valued media corporation to whatever happened last week.
“As part of this shift, we will no longer publish content on vice.com, instead putting more emphasis on our social channels as we accelerate our discussions with partners to take our content to where it will be viewed most broadly,” Dixon writes. I have absolutely no idea what that means. It does mean layoffs for hundreds of very good staff members (Anna Merlan, most notably), which is awful. Vice did a ton of great work (via Motherboard, via its video team, etc,); it’s documentaries were really groundbreaking and its journalism was really inspired.
It did a lot of not good work, too, and it was a nightmare for labor practices, exploitation and the usual bad things that come from the punk rock set when they try to make actual money and stop being cool. This is all before we get to its white nationalist co-founder, of course.
The roller coaster ride of Vice was well-documented in the legacy media because Vice was so outlandish and so successful early. Vice main dude Shane Smith got his fair share of laudatory “he’s a genius” coverage, but he also spent all that valuation money in ways that drew a lot of eyes. This is all a way to say that Smith is as much as a snake oil salesman as all the various industrialists and capitalists of the 21st century.
Smith promised to bring “millennials back to television” via Viceland, which did not happen. Smith found a lot of easy money in building this brand, but never expanded it in the ways he told his investors he would. Vice filed for bankruptcy last year. It was, to my eyes, a matter of time until the huge layoffs happened, as they did last week.
In that conversation with my friend and former colleague, we were talking about a different company in the space and I said the famous words “They’re trying to be everything to everyone. That never works.” Even though we absolutely weren’t talking about Vice, nor were we even thinking about Vice, she and I were definitely talking about Vice.
Vice wanted to be everything to everyone while also trying to be Batman (or, at least, Bruce Wayne). The former – the punk magazine turning into documentaries turning into a site turning into a series of sites turning into a corporation with an ad wing and a cable channel – is a bad business and the latter is just bad. Smith – and his execs – wanted to Batman while also being cool, making money and being the grocery store of media. It couldn’t happen and it didn’t happen because the money ran out. The money always runs out.
As I’ve written here seemingly innumerable times, I’m never happy when journalists lose their jobs and I don’t revel in Vice’s layoffs. But, as always, the people responsible – the shiny shirt know-it-alls who get high six-figure salaries and the “move fast and break things” dipshits – will be fine and the actual journalists get the shitty outcome. It sucks and it speaks to work not loving anyone, or even mattering.
Lulu Update
Now that I’m back in town, we are back to our usual Lulu content. As in: I take a million pictures of her where she looks uninterested or cute or hungry or is asleep.
