The Vice Media Collapse Was Entirely The Fault Of Incompetent, Fail-Upward Brunchlords

As we survey the rubble that once was the U.S. journalism industry, a common refrain involves lamenting that “online journalism just isn’t profitable.” But as the recent collapse of outlets like Sports Illustrated and The Messenger illustrate, the real culprit often isn’t that journalism isn’t profitable, it’s that U.S. media is predominantly run by utterly incompetent individuals who fail upward into positions of power.

Last week’s collapse of Vice media came as no surprise given years of stories about waste and excess by a rotating crop of terrible management. Also unsurprising is that most of the postmortems (usually written by people employed in the U.S. media sector who would like to remain so and don’t want to offend ownership by being honest) involve lots of vagaries as to responsibility.

There was a lot of ambiguous finger pointing at the supposed inherent impossibility of making money in online journalism. Most breakdowns just parroted the soulless, AI-esque memo to staff by CEO Bruce Dixon without context, blaming ambiguous externalities and the supposedly unavoidable unprofitability of running a silly old website in the TikTok and Twitch era:

“As we navigate the ever-evolving business landscape, we need to adapt and best align our strategies to be more competitive in the long term...We create and produce outstanding original content true to the Vice brand. However, it is no longer cost-effective for us to distribute our digital content the way we have done previously.“

As usual, you have to go over to independent media outlets like Defector to find something vaguely resembling the truth: that Vice was run into the ground by a rotating crop of utterly incompetent trust fund failsons who created unrealistic, hype-fueled company valuations, hoovered up exorbitant salaries, implemented numerous incoherent strategy pivots, and set giant piles of money on fire on a rotating crop of increasingly stupid ideas:

“The band of worthless but extravagantly overcompensated executives who seized the Vice ship from its previous regime of worthless but extravagantly overcompensated executives have decided that the business’s new direction will be in content licensing and re-emphasized social media channels, and that’s that.”

You know, brunchlords.

While permalancing at Vice’s tech pub Motherboard I was paid a whopping $300 per story to write 382 articles over five years, covering everything from the death of local journalism and the empty hype surrounding 5G, to regulatory capture and the corrupt mess that is U.S. telecom policy. I stayed because I enjoyed the work, and my editors were all class acts.

Numerous Vice editors and staff writers were paid salaries as little as $35,000 a year in New York City (you’d find retirement or financing a home purchase easier with a career at fucking Quiznos). At the same time, executives, clearly incapable of any sort of coherent strategic vision, gobbled up massively outsized compensation not at all commensurate with their workloads or performance:

“The exorbitant pay of the executive team responsible for steering Vice Media into urgent financial disaster and thus into the hands of private equity: Vice chief communications officer Jonathan Bing took home $640,000 in salary and bonuses in the 12 months prior to Vice’s bankruptcy filing; chief operating officer Cory Haik took home $726,000; executive vice president Subrata De was paid $779,000; chief marketing officer Nadja Bellan-White hauled in $835,000.”

Even as the company was facing bankruptcy and freelancers and staffers were either fired without severance or (like myself and other Vice freelancers) watched huge segments of their incomes instantly evaporate, legal filings illustrated how Vice executives were handed $11 million dollars — for doing arguably little to nothing — from May 2022 to May 2023.

This, somehow, often gets distorted into the “unforeseen challenges facing modern online media ventures today” by a feckless press pretending to ascertain what went wrong without pissing off management.

When it comes to financing Vice journalism and keeping the lights on, the problem wasn’t the people doing the actual fucking work. Nor is it the costs of doing actual journalism. As noted previously, The equally incompetently managed The Messenger burned through fifty million fucking dollars in less than a year; enough to fund any competently managed modest newsroom for the better part of a decade.

But again, if you read most mainstream analysis of the Vice collapse, executive incompetence is either downplayed or simply nowhere to be found. Instead, the collapse of Vice, like most mismanaged modern U.S. media companies, is often left causation free, somehow the unfortunate, unforeseen consequence of ambiguous externalities in the thankless job of informing the public about factual reality online.

Hey, maybe it was all the fault of those dastardly wokes.

While Vice does have a well-earned reputation for quirky hipster engagement bait (Transhumanist Alien Ketamine!), the outlet also did oceans of excellent journalism. Especially at outlets like Motherboard, where Joseph Cox was a wrecking ball on the cybersecurity beat. Several of the sub-brand’s best editors and writers wisely smelled the looming carrion and left last year to create the excellent 404 Media.

Yes, making money in journalism is difficult. The journalism advertising market has cratered, and the public’s attention span is now fractured across an ocean of quick-dopamine-hit video apps and social media apps where mindless engagement bait is now god.

But as academics like Victor Pickard have long argued, U.S. journalism should have always been viewed as a nonprofit or minimally profitable public service in need of creative (potentially even public) funding by anybody even semi-competently interested in its long-term survivability.

Instead, a rotating crop of hedge fund bros, VCs, and bankers decided to treat an essential cornerstone of functional U.S. society like a disposable napkin. A hollow, purely extractive and self-serving pursuit of mindless engagement at impossible scale. That this brutal exploitation opened the door to abuse by authoritarians keen on undermining the very concept of a shared reality never entered their thick skulls.

At the same time, our federal media policies have been abysmal failures, with policymakers routinely turning a blind eye to mindless consolidation and the impact it has on media diversity. Efforts to create alternative funding for independent journalism have also been feckless and incoherent, never stepping close to the same priority reserved for the latest tech hype bubble or cryptocurrency scam.

The result is has been the birth of a hollow, privacy-violating, engagement-based infotainment apparatus at a scale never seen on Earth. A system where all the financial incentives point in twisted directions, drowning us in wave upon wave of automated gibberish and partisan propaganda that’s way more profitable — and more consistently financed — than journalism ever was.

Now, the same “leaders” that caused the collapse of Buzzfeed, Vice, and The Messenger want to use AI to create an even more mindless engagement ouroborus that shits out advertising money at impossible scale with an utter disregard for audience, information quality, journalism, foundational reality, or the broader public interest.

U.S. journalism isn’t entirely hopeless (though it sure felt like it last week as we all rushed to archive years of work before deletion by an extraction class utterly disinterested in preservation or history).

There are still community-driven outlets like Techdirt. There are still outstanding outlets like ProPublica genuinely interested in challenging American wealth, corruption, and power. Some journalists have found a path to profitability and building direct reader readerships through newsletters (albeit not without some ugly wrinkles). The Motherboard folks who left to form 404 Media say, strangely enough, that without a cavalcade of trust fund failsons leeching resources, their journalism should prove profitable.

But putting the future of journalism in the hands of individual newsletter authors and smaller outlets without the financial resources to fend off narcissist billionaires (virulently and routinely angry that you’ve told the truth) raises more than a few questions about scale and sustainability.

More broadly, there’s simply no financial incentive to fix or reform any of the underlying rot in an industry peppered by people who view journalism as a purely extractive profit-taking exercise. The kinds of folks that make $835,000 incompetently implementing a new hare-brained pivot every seven months in the pretense they’re helping very much like things the way they are.

So, barring some unforeseen innovation, or a transformative epiphany by those with wealth and power (a segment not always keen on independent journalism that critiques wealth and power), this is, with fleeting exception, precisely how things will remain until the wheels come completely off.