Stakes is high

The death of Vice reveals a much larger problem

The news wasn’t surprising, yet still it crashed hard: Vice Media is shutting down.

This story struck a nerve, in part, due to how Vice staff learned they were about to be unemployed: through rumors online, followed by an insensitive boilerplate memo from CEO Bruce Dixon.

Vice has always been contentious. This is as true behind the scenes as it is in their reporting. One founder is a far-right provocateur who later founded the Proud Boys. Another is infamous for his lavish lifestyle and for taking more out of the company than it could handle.

The company’s focus was often erratic and trollish. I remember the early incarnation of the print magazine in New York City. They were scattered everywhere, like religious propaganda. Articles weren’t far removed from “bat boy on the moon,” only dealing with urban gossip, a prototype of Twitter comment sections.

And still.

Vice has produced absolutely fantastic reporting. On-the-ground investigative reporting into Nepalese human trafficking, gas poisoning in India, and Indonesian pirates. In America they stitched together Jan 6 footage into a compelling narrative and tackled QAnon earlier than most. Vikram Gandhi’s reporting on doctor-assisted death is gripping; Anna Merlan and Tim Marchman’s coverage of Tim Ballard, indispensable. I even almost enjoyed the Snoop Dogg documentary. 

After posting about the death of Vice on Threads, I received a number of comments about the organization’s incompetence. Yes, but also: you didn’t actually read or watch much of its output. Sure, you had to wade through a bunch of nonsense, yet so much modern media relies on clickbait to help support actual reporting.

It’s not an ideal model, but it’s what we have. I’d rather sift through garbage to find a gem than only have garbage because, as I’ll get to, we’re quickly approaching a giant landfill with no buried treasure at all.

Specifically, I shared this pull quote:

One commenter notes that these aren’t the executives to focus on, but the highest levels of the C-Suite, whose members raked in millions. Sure, but: perspective. I’m nearly certain the reporting staff pulled in a fraction of what these managers made. While successful operations depend upon a variety of tasks, the story of the people who create the content being monetized not being paid an equitable share is exhausting to repeat.

I’ll miss Vice, all the more so knowing that it didn’t have to end this way, or at all, but once again private equity destroying something important is the story we’re forced to endure:

In 2000, private-equity firms managed about 4 percent of total U.S. corporate equity. By 2021, that number was closer to 20 percent. In other words, private equity has been growing nearly five times faster than the U.S. economy as a whole.

The story behind the story of Vice’s demise is even more disturbing.

Democracy dies in boardrooms

I’m not going to romanticize the past. Journalism has consistently evolved in its 500-year (or so) history. The fact that so much news is now consumed in headline form on social media means that journalism has to adapt to this format, not pretend it doesn’t exist.

One practice, first hinted at by the New York Daily Times in 1851 (and formalized across the industry a half-century later), is necessary for investigative journalism: fact-checking. A lack of guardrails on information is dangerous, as that’s how information is weaponized.

Over the past year, I’ve co-published articles in Time and the Boston Globe; in the coming weeks, my reporting for Mother Jones and Teen Vogue will be published. The first two are adaptations from our book, which was extensively fact-checked and involved multiple meetings with lawyers. Both Time and the Boston Globe had its own rigorous fact-checking process, which also involved legal consultation. Of note: these excerpts were published as op-eds, which, despite constant confusion by many, is a separate form of writing than reporting.

My 1,100 word article on AI and health misinformation for Mother Jones required a near-complete rewrite, followed by a weeks-long fact-checking process. My final draft included 47 annotations, with links to all original source material stored in Google Drive. From start to finish, this article will have taken roughly two months to report and edit. It will be read in five to eight minutes.

My piece on male eating disorders for Teen Vogue involved only two interviews (instead of seven, like Mother Jones), so the process was a bit quicker. Yet there’s still a process, one in which I’m held accountable for every word.

None of this occurs on Substack. Given that I’ve gone through this process countless times in a quarter-century in this industry, I do my best to convey the most accurate and reliable information possible. Still I’ll make mistakes, especially since this column tends to be more on the op-ed side of journalism. I’m clear that a lot of this material is opinion, and when I convey facts, I share the source, which I’ve read and vetted.

Most media today is written and shared more like Substack than Mother Jones. Many writers, a number with much larger platforms than mine, have never gone through an actual editorial process. As an editor, I’ve known a number of writers allergic to this process—which says more about them than rigorous editing. This isn’t a field for you if you’re too married to your words.

The distance between journalism and opinion can be witnessed in this excellent interview by Taylor Lorenz, who held LibsofTikTok founder, Chaya Raichik, to account for her anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric, while all Chaya could do is rebut by claiming Taylor is a lizard person.

One was reporting, the other expressing an opinion, and a ridiculously dumb one at that. Yet, time and again, the latter is treated as if she’s doing journalism. (Chay claims to be a journalist during the interview, which is utterly false given she’s not subject to any fact-checking or editorial process whatsoever.)

Accountability matters. Journalism doesn’t exist without editorial oversight and fact-checking. Any society that abandons this process is prone to losing much more, which is exactly what happens when private equity focuses more on profits than news. And anyone who thinks we can’t experience the loss of democracy that accompanies the loss of journalism—“it can’t happen here”—is destined to be humbled.

I’m not sure what the fact-checking process was like at Vice, but some safeguards were certainly in place. Journalism without editorial isn’t journalism. Given today’s media delivery platforms, propaganda can cosplay as news and its audience can’t discern a difference.

The loss that follows this death will be greater than anyone can imagine.