What the end of Vice.com tells us about the future of media

Vice, the website whose voice was so distinctive it once spawned parodies like “I went to a masquerade orgy ball organized by a former Serbian crime boss,” stopped publishing a few weeks ago. Its CEO announced in an internal memo that the company is moving to a “studio model,” i.e. they’ll sell their content only to brands and platforms who want to promote it.

A decade ago, Vice — in the words of one of its former writers, Nick Hilton— made a bet on being cool. You could hear it in their irreverent voice. “Of all the places that I’ve written for,” Hilton explains, “Vice comes the closest to speaking with a single voice.” Case in point: One of the first edits he received was changing “backpacked German tourists” to “backpacked German dickheads.” Vice’s voice became so ubiquitous it was roasted, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it’s usually a sign that a brand has clearly defined itself in the market. A former BuzzFeed executive was telling me recently that one of the company’s first goals was to eventually be roasted on late-night TV (they went on to reach that goal!). Being mocked can mean you’ve arrived.

But “the currency of cool is a fickle master,” as Hilton writes, and many of the brands that defined themselves as such are slowly disappearing. Where are we heading? Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis argues that creating content isn’t the right business model for new media companies — instead, “journalism is… a service built on conversation, community, and collaboration.” And, in a four-part series, media executive Doug Shapiro traces key forces shaping how we’ll spend our attention in 2024 and beyond:

• Fragmentation: We don’t all pay attention to the same few things.
• Disintermediation: Legacy media is losing power to frame the world for us.
• Concentration: Networks of creators and consumers gain power and attention.
• Virtualization: New technologies blur the lines between what’s real and not.

Shapiro’s entire series is worth reading. Here’s one key insight: “Value flows to scarce resources. As content becomes infinite, a few things become relatively scarce: attention; hits; first-party data; curation; community and fandom; IP and brands; marketing prowess; and IRL experiences.”

What else we’re reading

• I was moved by this essay from Margaret Dean, a writer with late-diagnosed autism who is carving out a life that gives her the time and space to be creative on her own terms. “How do we evaluate success?” Dean asks, “Is it by how we make a living, or the material assets we accumulate? Is it by our ‘service to others,’ whatever that means?” For Dean, success involves prioritizing your own creativity and sanity instead of chasing career advancement because it seems like the socially acceptable thing to do.
• Accessibility and low-vision advocate Rebecca Rosenberg tested the Apple Vision Pro. One of Rosenberg’s impairments, nystagmus, means she experiences rapid and involuntary eye movements. Thankfully, the Vision Pro has been built with thoughtful accessibility features for people with vision impairments, like a specific setting to ignore involuntary eye movements.

Your daily dose of practical wisdom

When you’re interviewing for a job, focus your energy on how you can help the hiring manager — not on touting your own accomplishments. Your job is to be useful, not to be important.

Written by Harris Sockel
Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

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