A Requiem for Vice
On Friday, Vice closed up shop.
That morning, employees found themselves locked out of company accounts with a crappy, likely AI generated, HR notice letting them know the company they worked for was kaput.
Vice is another victim of private equity and greedy management. On the way down, company leadership paid themselves generous salaries while gutting the newsroom. Former Vice Reporter, Joseph Cox, now at 404 Media, documented much of this last year: execs in the newsroom drawing salaries north of $800k, while shortchanging vendors, and forcing reporters to pay work expenses out of pocket, such as the costs for government document requests and database access.
I’ve consumed news (and the frivolity: Desus & Mero, Huang’s World, etc.) from Vice for twenty years. I’ve used Vice videos in my classroom, to plan itineraries for trips Hope and I took, and to scout streetfood recs in Asia.
The reporters at Vice did phenomenal reporting on big tech and digital privacy through their Motherboard vertical and their coverage of violent far-right movements was indispensable. If you haven’t listened to American Terror, about the neo-Nazi group “The Base” operating in Eastern Washington and Idaho, you should hit play on it as soon as you finish reading this. And yes, Arabic speakers–the Nazis named themselves “The Base” or Al Qaeda in Arabic.
When I heard about Vice’s demise, I knew I’d write about it for the newsletter. In a time when the worst moral actors and scumbags seem ascendant in our society, quality journalism is more important than ever. But instead we’re getting diminished coverage from gutted newsrooms due to poor management structures and failed revenue models.
The management at Vice made incompetence an artform. Friday morning, they removed employee access to most of the company’s systems but didn’t revoke the keys to the backend used by the podcasts. So, amid rumors of the entire website going down and decades of stories being erased, a handful of vets from Vice took to the mic on the Cyber podcast to grieve the demise of the company and to recount the poor leadership on the sinking ship. It’s an amazing artifact of our times—hearing them talk about knowing the end was nigh, receiving radio silence from upper management for over six months, and still doing high-quality reporting right up to the very end.
Speaking of that reporting, I think I want to share a few of my favorite Vice pieces. First, the aforementioned American Terror, the podcast is about PNW neo-Nazis and their collaborative networks abroad. These people are far more numerous, inter-connected, and organized than we like to think about or admit to. We ignore them at our own peril.
Here’s some others worth (re)visiting:
From the DMZ Into the Hermit Kingdom - a work of gonzo journalism where Shane Smith travels to North Korea and documents his experience traveling to the DMZ and eventually into Pyongyang. The Stalinist Hermit Kingdom of North Korea has always been a curiosity to me. I remember watching this video at a friend’s house one night and repeatedly muttering “WTF?”
Life As An Illegal Immigrant in Greece - Vice reporters embedded with South Asian migrants in Athens. Many of the migrants were trapped in slave-like conditions, working under the table in strawberry and flower farms, facing persecution and violent attacks from their employers and members of the fascist Golden Dawn party.
Sneaking a Camera into Mecca to Film Hajj - Vice co-founder Suroosh Alvi accompanied his Pakistani-American parents on Hajj to Mecca and Medina. The footage he brought back gives you a sense of the scale of Hajj, which brings upwards of four million people to Mecca each year.
The Fat Farms of Mauritania - In Mauritania to be heavy is a sign of wealth and beauty. There are finishing schools where some women go to intentionally gain weight. Vice correspondent Thomas Morton, a perpetual human experiment, traveled there to experience it first hand—chugging liters of camel milk and taking appetite inducing pills with predictable gastro-intestinal distress.
Nigeria’s Oil Pirates - the people of the Niger River Delta live on some of the world’s largest oil reserves but see no benefit from it. Plagued by corrupt local officials, environmental damage from drilling, and having their traditional fishing grounds destroyed has led to a campaign of armed resistance, sabotage, and theft from the oil pipelines. The scenes from the improvised refineries, deep in the jungle, feel surreal.
There are dozens of others, including behind the scenes reporting in Afghanistan, during the US occupation and reporting from the Syrian city of Raqqa as Syrian forces fought against ISIS for control of the city.
Vice gave us a lens into stories we wouldn’t get elsewhere. While you can see from how old some of these videos are, Vice had fallen from its glory days, it’s still a loss and will be missed.
When I finished today’s newsletter it was the longest one ever, by 600 words, so I am splitting it in two this week and will hit your inbox Wednesday or Thursday with reader responses to last week’s edition about the decline of utopian thinking.
Y’all had takes!
As always, if you have any thoughts or feedback about the newsletter, I welcome it, and I really appreciate it when folks share the newsletter with their friends.