YouSaid · the spoken record

Shane Smith

lines on the record: 45
first: 2024-04-11
most recent: 2024-04-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“That's true. Vice was very much a brand that was about sex and drugs. That was part of the appeal. And so if we're thinking about what appeals to Gen Z, what appeals to young people, you know, what they're looking for, I don't know that it's vice. It might very well be that Shane Smith still has a sensibility that is Vice's sensibility, but it may be that as a culture, we're not interested in that anymore. That's a possibility too.”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean. It's not impossible. There certainly have been 50 year old media executives who have understood how to sell things to kids. There's not quite enough appreciation for how much vice was at the right place at the right time. Like when vice moved into its Williamsburg space in 2015, it had displaced two Indy Rock venues. There was always like a sense of like the commoditization of the cool that vice was. And I think now when we talk about kids these days, you know, we're talking about Gen Z. We're not talking about millennials because we're 40 and like a lot of us are parents and we have 401ks if we're lucky and like, you know, all that stuff. We're boring. I am out of touch with the Gen Z sensibility very blissfully so. I don't mind my quiet life as a middle-aged woman.”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me ask you kind of the last big think question here. Shane Smith might want to swoop back in and fix Vice, and he might want to bring that sensibility back. And he actually knows how to pitch it. And maybe he's the thing that makes the Sulko. Shane Smith is also a 54-year-old post economic potential billionaire who is buying Picasso, China. He's living a very different life than the person who started the punk rock scene in Montreal and literally like faked the idea of big distribution for it and made deals and did all this stuff. He's a business person now. Like I think most people think of him as a media executive, not this like punk rock entrepreneur guy. For a company that's built on sensibility, can Shane Smith, 54-year-old, I sold my house for $48 million. Can he go and connect with a bunch of teenagers and be a rebel again? It seems like...”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That story is personified in Shane Smith, right? Like that is Shane Smith selling people a tale. And then when he's no longer the face of the story, it gets quickly out of control and it spirals. But he's still in the mix, right? There's a report in the rap that he's trying to buy Weiss again. What is his relationship to the company right now?”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Keep coming back to is the sort of the screwball cast of suits where there was just a real reluctance to understand what business they were in and how to run it, that more than anything kind of made this a little bit inevitable. There was just not a clear picture of what vice itself was, even in the minds of the people who were running it. While all of this was going on, the salaries, again, were quite high. There was a great deal of money that stayed on the balance sheet because those executives were not fired right away. There is an executive I spoke to who called the accounting there fan fiction finance. Basically they believed the pitch so thoroughly that they hadn't actually sat down to look at what they had. You know, like it was like you just were such a true believer in the thing that vice could be.”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If I knew this kind of thing, I would be a media executive instead of a reporter, right? Maybe? Sure. Let's say sure. What was fascinating to me was that this reorg didn't happen right after bankruptcy. Because if it is the right answer, the time to do it is as quickly as possible because you want to cut as many costs as quickly as you possibly can, right? Like you're in bankruptcy. Like the idea is to restructure the company in such a way that it becomes viable. And so The faster you can figure out what to cut loose and what to sell and who to fire, you know, the faster you sort of get on the road to being profitable. So from that perspective, the idea of vice becoming a B2B studios business that doesn't strike me as a bad idea. That seems like a perfectly viable thing. It's certainly an important part of what they were doing throughout all of these years. It's just befuddling to me that it took until January for them to do it.”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The rest of the timeline is fairly straightforward. In May 2023, Weiss filed for bankruptcy. In August 2023, it sells itself to Fortress for $350 million, and in February 2024, the company stopped publishing to the website, lays off hundreds of people, including huge numbers of journalists, and pivots to being a production studio. There's something inevitable about this. What if I always should have just been a production studio? It's hard to monetize websites, and vice was known for its video operation for like 20 years. It feels like a lot of people should be asking why it took Vice so long to get here”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things that was frustrating for me was like not being able to crack antenna because I genuinely would love to know what happened there. Was there more than meets the eye? I mean, was there a real business advice that just didn't sell because Vice didn't know how to pitch itself, for instance, because that's a real possibility too. It's possible that Vice just didn't understand in those acquisition talks how to tell a coherent story about what it was. It's possible that antenna looked at the books, realized that the deal was one of the things that was kind of holding the company together, and then pulled the plug to drive it into bankruptcy so they could buy it on the cheap. Like there are lots of ways this story can go, and I just don't know what happens to be true here. I just know that there are these signatures, these directors for this company that have nothing to do with antenna that are tied to the Saudi National Bank.”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're writing the story. My view of this was like these are some dots. We invite the audience to connect these dots, right? People were asking you to figure out this connection between antenna and vice and the Saudi money. There's something about how Vice was financed at the end, like the underlying foundation of its finances that suggests that actually its business was nothing, right? It was just like taking Saudi money in some way or another or taking money from antenna in some way or another to make stuff that had no relationship to the consumer brand that was being expressed in the United States.”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But what had happened was that Weiss had a longstanding deal with antenna. They had renewed the deal to make content for antenna group. And Antenna Group is like this Greek company that operates a bunch of over-the-air television stations. It was, I think, over 200 hours of TV a week that they were making for antenna group. There was an attempt at a sale process with antenna group and group black, which is another media owner, and nothing happened. The sale process failed. And after that sale process failed, Weiss was in bad shape. So if you go and look at the bankruptcy filings, which I highly recommend, they're a very entertaining read. They had already taken three forbearances on their loans at that point. And the entity that was associated with this antenna group deal didn't pay them. And it triggered the end of that.”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It would have been fascinating to see Visco Public that way in 2021, but it didn't happen. Another thing that almost happened but didn't was an acquisition deal with Antenna Group, a European television broadcaster based in Greece.”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm a sicko. What can I say? Part of that was that they had raised money from TPG. They had a preferred stock in vice media that meant that they got additional equity if the company didn't hit certain performance markers. This is reportedly, I think that's the journal that had reported that out. The way that SPACs work is that there's just a company that is only money and hangs out on the market looking for an acquisition target. And then when it finds an acquisition target, the two merge and you have a publicly traded company that didn't exist before. What this does is it lets people in the company being acquired talk about what they plan for the future in a way that is not allowed in IPOs.”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That would have revealed whatever was there, whatever it was that was happening there would have been public. And I am in many ways very sorry that this deal failed because I love a public company. I do. I love reading your financial reports, guys.”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So funny that in the grand scheme of shady vice things, the Spac deal doesn't even rank because it's just like a thing that happened and then didn't happen and then the point of a spac deal is to be listed as a public company. It's just the mechanism by which you get listed is not subject to as much scrutiny as a traditional IPO process. But that scrutiny would have revealed that Weiss didn't have a business. If they do the $3 billion fact deal and the company is listed publicly, then they're a public company and they have to. That there was nothing there.”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“kind of turnaround. There's a sort of relentless contraction of the staff throughout all of this. A lot of the lower level folks I spoke to understood what was going on and they were just like, okay, so when's my number coming up?”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was this period where it was becoming clear that things were changing in the business. Some of that does have to do with the way that advertising is sold online. There is a kind of advertisement where there is essentially an automated breathing process and the lowest bidder wins. And so that just drives ad rates relentlessly down. And it's not just every media property that's involved in this. You're also essentially competing against a bunch of social networks which have gotten very big and very powerful. So it's just a different period on the internet than 2014 was. And this is like a time when there needed to be an adjustment. And there were some adjustments, but it seems like it was not enough. It's not enough money for, you know, the number of executives that they have. It's not enough money for all of their ambitions. It's very clear that they're going to need to do something.”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back talking with Verge Sr. reporter Liz Lapato about what really happened advice. So, in 2021, the company tried to go public through a SPAC deal. It was very much the trend of the moment. Right now, the biggest spac in the news is Trump's Truth Social, which is a great example of how a spack deal can generate a lot of attention and a lot of money without anyone doing the kind of due diligence a more traditional IPO would require.”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're kind of divided about Nancy Dubuque. Almost everybody agreed that she had done a wonderful job at A&E. There was no real disagreement on that point. But there were people who thought that she had personally run the business into the ground because she didn't understand what she was doing. And there were people who thought what Shane had created was unfixable. And Nancy probably couldn't have saved it. And maybe nobody could have saved it.”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To me, Occam's razor suggests just chaos and an overwhelmed accounting department. Like I had one division head tell me that they had essentially Done their own shadow accounting in order to make sure that they were meeting their budget because they couldn't rely on the actual accounting department to tell them because the actual accounting department was so overwhelmed. This is where that moment of not really building out the business part of the business kind of came back to bite vice. One of the things that I heard from two executives was that there was a netjets account on the digital budget. And net jets, if you're not familiar, is a private jet service. I thought that that was certainly strange. Two people took credit for canceling that. Two different people told me that they personally had done it. So there was just a level of organizational chaos there that in some ways made it incredibly difficult to run a real business. And, you know, the people I spoke to”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The TV world is as you've described like a hits business. Like you need a hits show, you need a hit show on HBO. They're going to renew the deal. Your cable channel needs to be a hit. Something has to happen. The website is a much more plotting business, right? You like put up some stories every day. The audience comes back. You sell some ads. And those seem like they operate on different time frames. And one of those things is a little more predictable, a little more consistent than the other. And then in your reporting, you find out that a bunch of expenses are being moved around these things to make them all look different or better at different times. That's the part that like really jumped out at me in this story is, is that normal? Is that like a particularly advice thing? Is that just a crazy chaotic company that no one's in charge of?”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The tension of having different audiences, right? The pitch of like dealing with young people, a lot of us just didn't come back to cable. I didn't come back to cable. The people who are going to be watching a cable channel are not necessarily the same people who are going to be interacting with the stuff online. It seemed like they got, you know, different audiences in cable versus, you know, YouTube, for instance. So there was sort of a disconnect between these parts of the business. It wasn't working as smoothly as perhaps, you know, people had hoped when they had set it up in this way”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things that really strikes me about this period in particular is there's the sensibility required to run a cable channel, which maybe you need a cable executive to do that. You need it to be more mainstream in more ice road truckers, whatever that thing is. There's vices sort of classic video sensibility. And then there's the sensibility that's happening on the website, which is, you know, at this point, like winning awards, right? Like a Pulitzer Prize. Emmy's a Peabody. They are becoming a very aggressive muscular news organization. They're out in the world causing trouble and then like overhear is we need to program a cable channel with a bunch of like shows about weed or whatever Nancy thinks FICE is. That seems like a real tension that I think your story got at more closely than anything else I've read about Weiss before.”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. So you're thinking broadly noisy motherboard, like these sort of blog within a blog moments. And what I had heard from some of the people who worked at them was that they'd get spun up in response to some deal. And then essentially forgotten about”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My understanding, based on the folks who spoke with me, is that she focused on the stuff that she understood, which was the cable channel. One of the problems that happened was that Vice lost its deal with HBO for Vice News Tonight. That was a really important deal for the company. It was, as I understand it, profitable. It's always a problem when you lose a profitable part of your business, you know. So they made a deal with Showtime, and the guy who had been running the show exited and they brought in someone else. There were sort of a series of decisions or moments like this that were happening where there was a kind of changing of talent. There was a kind of, I guess, maybe lowering of expectations, one might say, like going from HBO to Showtime is, I would argue, a downgrade. I think that was part of what was going on. One of the other things that I heard from folks who were working at the website was like these verticals would be spun up as deals.”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, Nancy is now in charge. She's the CEO. There's the vice newsroom and the website, the digital side. They have a cable channel called Viceland. They are selling shows to HBO and CNN. Is she running all of that? Is she running part of it? Is she paying attention to some parts more or less than others?”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And to some degree, if you are in the taste business, your job is to make hits that are recognizable as part of that taste. And so there was this sort of idea that you needed to know what a vice story was or what a vice documentary was in order to really successfully run the business. And many people I spoke to said that Nancy never really got a handle on that part of it”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had someone tell me he'd learn valuable lessons from his coworkers about what never to do with a company. I had someone say that the people that had been brought in were essentially in vice costumes. You know, they were people who didn't understand what vice was or what vice did, but they were trying to dress like hipsters. Part of what Shane did was he created essentially a taste business. Weiss had a sensibility. You know, it was politically aware, it was politically engaged, it was culturally aware and culturally engaged. And there was just a sort of genes ⁇ quois about that. And Nancy, who was an extremely successful executive at A&E, was responsible for shows like Duck Dynasty and Ice Road Truckers, which are not really like the vice sensibility. That's not what Vice is doing.”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The descriptions that I got of the people who were operating under Nancy were not complimentary. I'm just going to read a couple of them. One of them was a fucking clown show. Another one was comical. Another one was cartoonish, screwball cast of suits.”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Welcome back. We're talking to Verge Senior Reporter Liz Lopato about the downfall of vice. This is the big turn, the height of the Shane Smith era. He was out there collecting huge investments all the time, $250 million from ANE Networks, a total of four hundred million dollars from Disney, and the valuations are just going up. It seems like Shane wants to sell the company at a huge number, and no one will give him that number, so instead of selling, he just keeps raising more money. But then, right at the end of 2017, the New York Times publishes a bombshell report about sexual harassment and misconduct inside Vice. The company was very much a boys club environment, and that report, which landed right as the Me Too movement, was gaining steam, was too much to ignore. So Shane Smith stays on as executive chairman, but he steps down as CEO and replaces himself with Nancy Dubuque, a vice board member and television executive from A&E Networks. That could have been the moment when Vice Media finally had an adult in the room and the organization grew up. But that is not what happened.”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Being like a startup, and everybody who has worked at a startup is kind of familiar with the shit show environment that a startup is, to installing a serious business organization with serious accounting and all of these sorts of functions that you need in order to be a grown-up business, basically.”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of. They start putting together video. They start selling video to places like CNN with the idea that you can bring in a youth audience. From there, they cobble together all of these partnerships. And there's this idea that they have that if you shoot the same video and package it different ways, you know, for TV, for OTT, and for web, you can make a lot more profit off the same video because all you're doing is editing it and you get to, you know, decide your own margins and that that's going to be the business, which at the time was not a ridiculous thing to think. It turns out that you need to handle things really differently for every single one of those markets, but that was not obvious at the moment. It was not a ridiculous bet to make. That was sort of like kind of the business plan. But one of the things that I sort of was discovering was that there was never a moment where Vice went from”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This was the vice business model, right? Like, fundamentally, they're putting content on the internet. They don't quite know how they're going to monetize it. They build some advertising infrastructure. They land a bunch of big sponsorships with big brands. But really, they're just sort of running from big investment to big investment.”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was a kind of frothy period because the interest rates were really low. And so there was a lot of money in the VC world, but also just around that was looking for places to go where there would be a return on investment. So I think that was part of what fueled this was this zero interest rate environment. But I think that that pitch at that time was really something a lot of traditional media companies had been really frightened by the way that the internet had taken their business. There had been, you know, a slowness to adopt online journalism.”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's talk about the business. I think people understand what advice is, but the business that they're building around this, that's the thing that ultimately fell apart so completely. And what's fascinating about that to me is the number of times Shane Smith was able to raise money at ever higher valuations did not appear to be linked to that business getting more sustainable or more scalable or even more predictable. It just seemed like he was able to raise a lot of money against his pitch of that we know what the kids are doing.”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, they started essentially as a fashion magazine, right? Like, that was like sort of the impetus If you listen to one of Shane Smith's many Joe Rogan experience interviews, I think this one took place in 2011. He talks about vice as essentially a fashion magazine. The movement into something that becomes bigger is really interesting. The pitch is essentially, we understand the kids and you do not. The children are not watching television. We speak to the youth in a way that nobody else speaks to the youth. That's why you should give us money. In fairness, I say this as part of the group of the quote unquote youth that they were talking about. They were doing stuff that was really distinctly different from what”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Weiss's style goes from an affectation to a real thing. And we know a lot of those journalists, we know a lot of people who've made that work over time who've worked in Vice's newsrooms. And it's actually really interesting to see how they sort of retroactively added an infrastructure of actual journalism to get to the thing that they were always supposed to be making. And that was very rigorous. And they were very daring in a lot of the work they did. They got into a lot of trouble, but I think Vice's management took it for granted in an almost like shocking and irresponsible way.”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Documentary came out in 2011. What happened next is advice did move into a journalism. They had a deal with HBO to produce documentaries. They had another deal to do a nightly news show, which also initially was on HBO. And Weiss's overall video style influenced the whole generation of video journalists online. In the News division, Vice News did some incredible stories, both in video and on the website. Vice One Emmys and Peabody Ward even appe”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a very famous moment where David Carr, who was then the media columnist for the New York Times, interviews Shane Smith and writes about him. Shane Smith says something about how the New York Times isn't doing stuff that's as daring as what Vice is doing. David Car sort of stops him and is like, look, the New York Times has been reporting on genocide since before your publication existed. Like, don't. This is, you're not a real journalist, don't do this. It is a pretty incredible watch. And I kind of wonder if that's maybe part of what motivated what happened next.”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The stories about the early days of ice are pretty chaotic. The investor who gave them that initial money has a pretty different version of events than the myths that Weisslater spun up. But whatever actually happened, Weiss was out there doing the kind of work that really resonated in the early blog era. Weiss was pretty tied in with the New York Indie rock and hipster scenes of the early two thousands, and it was known for things like its do's and don'ts column, where published photos of people at parties and out in the street with extremely rude captions. Oftentimes those people weren't aware that they were having their photos taken or having them published. That's all in the first decade of the 2000s. It was a very different time on the internet. But then things took a turn. Gavin McKinnis leaves in 2008, and Shane Smith has very different ideas for the future of Vice.”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's been a recurring theme with Gavin McInnes, including in the early days of ICE. It's one of the reasons that he ultimately got fired, is that he was bad for the brand. But he was sort of the original editorial voice. Shane Smith did a lot of the advertising stuff, and Saruch was sort of the go-to adult, if you will, in that group. So they're, you know, whatever, doing their punk zine at the very beginning. I think there are stories about them lying to get on welfare roles in order to get money to operate vice. They get an investment during the dot-com boom, the first one, in 1999.”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I heard a lot of theories about what the business of Weiss was, and I have like watched a lot of videos of Shane Smith describing the business of vice. I still don't have a super good handle on what was going on there. Why don't we back up and start at the very beginning? Began in Canada in the 90s. In this sense, it is a Gen X institution. This sort of, I guess, punk zine is the best way of putting it. And there are sort of some early key players. You have Shane Smith, you have Gavin McInnes and Sarouch Alvi, who are sort of the three big co-founders. Gavin McInnes, if that name is familiar to you, is also the founder of the Proud Boys.”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We built a lot of institutions a while ago on the internet. You might call them millennial media institutions. Pitchfork is one of those buzzfeed, notably another one, maybe the one. Vice is definitely one of those, although it's a bit older than all the rest. To be fair, Vox media and the Verge are one of those things, and I keep joking that we're the last website on Earth because it's not a great time in media on the internet right now. All the other ones are going away, including Vice News, including BuzzFeed News, including Pitchfork, down the line they're all going away. It feels tempting to say it's all for the same reasons. And that might be true in the case of vice. But I think what you uncovered is advice as a business, the phrase you used was Hall of Mirrors when you were describing the story to me. Like no one actually knew what the business of vice was.”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's always this feeling you get when you've started reporting a story and it's not at all the story you. It is where you're just like, oh, okay. I guess I'd better report the story that this actually is. I thought, oh, okay, this is a story about cookies on the internet. It's a story about advertising. This is a story about like how we built stuff that isn't sustainable. And it is a story about building stuff that isn't sustainable, but it is not a story about cookies and advertising, or at least not mostly a story about cookies and advertising.”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Company focused on selling video to social platforms and other kinds of distributors. Now, this is a pretty lousy time for digital media. There are layoffs going on everywhere because it's hard to make a profit from putting words on the web right now. So when Verge Senior Reporter Liz Lapada went to go report on what had happened to Vice, she and I both assumed that the company had been undone by the brutal economics of digital advertising on the web. But the Vice story is much more than that. In the words of one executive that talked to Liz for her story, it was a fucking clown show. It turns out that you really can fake it till you make it, all the way up to a $5.7 billion valuation in the case of Vice. But at some point you have to start running a real company. And Vice just never did that.”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Li Patel, editor in chief of the Verge. In Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today we're going to talk about vice, the media company, where it came from, what it did, and ultimately white recently collapsed into a much smaller, sadder version of itself. Vice is not a new company. It started in the 90s, but it grew into something massive with grand ambitions, enormous cultural influence, and a ludicrous amount of money behind it. The promise was advice could turn big investments into bigger profits and become a media behemoth for a new generation of internet natives. None of that happened. After a few very rocky years, Weiss declared bankruptcy in 2023, and earlier this year, as part of the post-bankruptcy restructuring, the company abruptly shut down its Pulitzer-winning news division laid off hundreds of people, and said it would stop publishing to its website entirely. Instead, Weiss will become a production.”
2024-04-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise and fall of Vice Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT