Teens love bullshit because they know how good it is for growing mushrooms.
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Coolville is cool, right?
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This text should appear verbatim below the title on every cover. Call it targeted marketing.
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footnotes
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…yet…
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Look at you guys and your fancy anchored footnotes!
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Agreed. I subscribe to Vice’s RSS feed and the vast majority of articles are very left leaning.
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I suspect someone’s not doing a very good job of distinguishing “cool” from “cool!”
The former is:
“Sorry I’m late, the bus took forever.”
“S’cool, no worries.”
or
“Check out this new Google search where you can upload a picture and it’ll find ones that look like it!”
“Oh, cool.”
The latter is an affirmation of hip or stylish status:
“That jacket is awesome, where’d you get it?”
“Bought it in Japan over the summer.”
“That’s fuckin’ cool!”
or
“Check out this bootleg vinyl — a demo session with Mike Patton and Eugene Chadbourne.”
“Oh, cool!”
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Of the People stories that I’ve looked at in detail (admittedly a narrow selection), they’ve been surprisingly well-referenced.
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Vice was the magazine for reactionary, nihilistic young pseudo-intellectuals for so long that old people like us have never bothered to reevaluate it. It was like Spin, except evil instead of just redundant.
Maybe it’s better now? Oops, too late, nobody cares.
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My 16yo is a huge Ben Folds fan. So I don’t care what she thinks about Vice.
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It’s a lot better now. They (like so many of us) for the most part grew out of that snotty NYC hipster cocaine and secret nightclubs and trashy fashion scene and now do legit journalism. They have different subchannels for specific areas of interest — Broadly for lady stuff, Motherboard for tech, Munchies for food, etc. The HBO show alone is enlightening and more committed than most anything on network TV, although it is a little war-junkie and stunty.
(I like how they keep sending that skinny little white nerd on the some of the most intimidating assignments, like interviewing paranoid Somalian warlords.)
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Was there ever a time when they weren’t?
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I think the problem a lot of us have with Vice boils down to the people that represent the reporting, most visible on the HBO show or online videos but in much of the writing too (since the writers’ personalities come through so strongly). They are snotty, obnoxious NYC hipsters - doing legit, often important journalism, covering stories that few others are right now, but their motivation for doing it seems more about how they are perceived (trying to be cool and edgy) than the actual story (and living their fantasy of being Hunter S. Thompson).
It can certainly be an amusing juxtaposition to see a skinny little white nerd interviewing Somalian warlords, and in normal circumstances that kind of juxtaposition can objectively help the interview by making the subject more at ease, but with Vice it feels too deliberate - the reporters basically insert themselves into the story, beyond what’s appropriate, for the sake of making it edgy.
Certainly, many reporters have had big egos and inserted themselves into stories in the past, but the way the Vice people do it is different - because they’re trying to be cool. It feels inauthentic and manipulative (and it works on a lot of people my age).
That said, despite the alt-right founder, as discussed in this thread, I do believe the people there are genuinely leftists/progressives, and the slant they take in the general news coverage is not wrong or bad in some way. I think few would read it if not for the trying-to-be-gonzo stuff also being there, since other outlets do general progressive news coverage and investigative reporting far better.
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Even when I was a teen, I knew People magazine is nowhere near as cool as this:
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Vise is infinitely cooler than Vice
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Surely, they missed the truly cool teens by using the cool/aware scale…
Everybody knows that the most woke kids use the 3D wired/tired/expired scale to rate things.
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