<
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/02/27/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."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
