Along with many layoffs in the mass media so far this year, Vice is shutting down: Vice Media to shutter website, lay off ‘several hundred’ employees – MarketWatch
The problem is too much content chasing too few readers and viewers. The tech companies are not to blame – blame goes to an old model of local monopolies that no longer works in a world of mass, low-cost competition. (Newspapers were historically local and regional monopolies or an 80/20 duopoly model. Local TV stations were restricted by the number of broadcast licenses available. The Internet eliminated that restriction and today’s content producers go straight to Youtube.)
Go to the MSN Start page or Yahoo News – the media landscape is flooded with stories, most of which are fluff and stupid. There’s an army of young 20-somethings fresh out of college with English Lit., Creative Writing, History, Art History, journalism, political science degrees – and not that many positions for them. So they work at content mills whose business model is to attract eyeballs for advertisers by flooding the market with tons of low quality, rapidly produced content – often recycling the same content over and over again – in hopes that something will get shared on social media and “go viral”. It’s a crazy business model – and doesn’t seem likely to succeed long term – except that soon, most of it will be AI generated so the costs will be really low.
Now is not the time for anyone to go into journalism or writing. The journalism field needs to shrink to fit today’s market reality.
