The number was once unthinkable. BuzzFeed went public in late 2021 at a valuation of more than $1.5 billion. As a private company, it had been worth $1.7 billion, and was the unicorn that set the benchmark for the decade’s digital-media venture funding. Allen acquired the entire operation for roughly 7% of that peak figure. Most of the purchase price is a five-year promissory note; the cash portion was only $20 million.

Meanwhile, Vox Media has spent the past three years quietly accepting that its 2015 NBCUniversal valuation of a little more than $1 billion is not coming back. Penske Media took a controlling stake in 2023, at a $500 million valuation, half what NBC had paid eight years earlier. Vice Media, valued in 2017 at $5.7 billion (yes, billion), filed for bankruptcy in May 2023, sold to its creditors for $350 million, and by February 2024, stopped publishing on Vice.com altogether. The brand survives. The company does not.

This is not really a story about three failed startups. This is a story about a genre of media that disrupted nothing, lasted briefly, and is now being sold for parts. Each of these companies was an experiment in betting that new distribution platforms could underwrite editorial ambition. The bet was wrong, but for a few years it looked right.

Vice began in 1994 as a Montreal free magazine, founded by Suroosh Alvi, Shane Smith, and Gavin McInnes; that last went on to found the Proud Boys, an awkward provenance that Vice Media still prefers to leave underdiscussed. By the mid-aughts, the magazine had relocated to New York and developed an aesthetic of irony-laced gonzo reportage: well-educated young men visiting war zones and methamphetamine encampments with their smirks intact. An HBO deal in 2013 conferred prestige. The editorial product retained its faux-outlaw posture. At its peak, the company ran 35 offices, an HBO show, an in-house creative agency called Virtue, and a record label. James Murdoch invested through Lupa Systems. So did Disney, TPG, and Technology Crossover Ventures. The 2017 valuation implied that Vice had cracked the code of monetizing youth-culture authenticity.

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It had not. What Vice had cracked was the willingness of corporate advertisers to pay premium rates to associate themselves with disreputability. When that willingness faded — and it began fading the moment the brand became too familiar to be transgressive — Vice had nothing left.

BuzzFeed’s story is more interesting, because the journalism, for a stretch, was real. Jonah Peretti, a co-founder of The Huffington Post, built BuzzFeed in 2006 as a viral-content laboratory. The famous early product was the listicle: “21 Pictures That Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity.” But in 2012, Peretti hired Ben Smith from Politico to build a news division on top of the listicle engine. Smith’s bet was that the same social-platform mechanics that propelled animal-rescue videos could also propel investigative journalism. He hired aggressively, opened bureaus across the world, and soon presided over a newsroom whose international reporting on the Chinese government’s mass internment of Uyghurs won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize. BuzzFeed News published the (dubious) Steele dossier in 2017. It covered Silicon Valley with greater sophistication than most of the legacy press. For five or six years, it was the most consequential newsroom in American digital journalism.

The catch was that the apparatus rested on Facebook’s referral algorithms. When Facebook decided, around 2018, that it had grown tired of subsidizing publishers, BuzzFeed’s traffic collapsed. The news division burned cash. In an April 2023 staff memo, Peretti admitted that he had “overinvested” in the news division because he loved the work, and confirmed what had been obvious for months: BuzzFeed News was shutting down. About 180 staffers were laid off.

Finally, there was Vox Media. Founded by media executive Jim Bankoff with seed funding from Comcast, the firm traveled a different route to the same destination. The Vox website launched in 2014 with two policy bloggers, Ezra Klein from The Washington Post and Matt Yglesias from Slate, joined by Melissa Bell, an editor with a digital pedigree from the Post. Vox’s premise was technocratic. Smart people were busy and confused; journalism’s job was to package the underlying expertise behind the news. The site’s design templates — an index-card-styled “explainer” footer, providing background context on stories, embedded charts, and house-style explainer videos — were copied by other publications. At its peak, Vox had a Netflix series called Explained, a billion-dollar valuation, and ambitions to be the equivalent of CNN.

Each of these companies succeeded by being native to the larger social-media platforms it depended on. Each was undone the moment the platforms changed terms. The collapses were not symmetrical. Vice went bankrupt. BuzzFeed shrank into peddling snark and lists, and shed half its workforce. Vox negotiated a soft landing inside Penske’s stable of legacy titles, which includes Variety and Rolling Stone. But the trajectory was the same.

Klein left Vox for The New York Times opinion section in late 2020. Matt Yglesias departed a week earlier for a Substack newsletter called Slow Boring, where he now earns considerably more than he did at Vox. Smith, the founding editor of BuzzFeed News, decamped in 2020 for a Times media column, then in 2022 co-founded Semafor, a newsletter platform, with the former Bloomberg Media chief Justin Smith. Semafor today employs some 80 people, has 750,000 newsletter subscribers, and generates more than half its revenue from live events. Lauren Williams, the BuzzFeed News deputy editor, left to start Capital B, a black-civic-journalism nonprofit. Other BuzzFeed alumni founded subscription products on Substack and Beehiiv. At Vice, the diaspora was wider and quieter: writers scattered to legacy outlets, independent production, freelance. 

Each departure made the same point. The value the platforms had accumulated was always portable. The audience attached itself to writers, not to the brand. When the writer left, the audience left, too. BuzzFeed could not retain Ben Smith’s authority because Ben Smith was the asset. Vox could not retain Klein’s subscribers because they were reading Klein, not Vox. These companies turned out to be temporary scaffolding around durable individual reputations.

This is, of course, what newspaper proprietors used to understand. H.L. Mencken’s name sold The Baltimore Sun. Walter Lippmann’s column ran in 250 newspapers because it was Lippmann’s column. Westbrook Pegler, Stewart Alsop, Jimmy Breslin, Mike Royko: their bylines moved subscriptions. The new-media companies briefly persuaded themselves that the brand was the asset. They were corrected. The talent walked. The shells remain.

The transactions of the past three years tell a story not of media renewal, but of media dismantlement. Vice’s $350 million 2023 sale to a consortium led by Fortress Investment Group, Soros Fund Management, and Monroe Capital was a creditor takeover dressed as a sale. CNBC reported at the time that the new owners planned to hold the company for two or three years and “further shave off the business.” They did. By February 2024, the new CEO had announced “several hundred” additional layoffs and confirmed that Vice.com would cease publishing original content. The website would now syndicate or partner with others. The brand was kept alive because brands have residual value. The journalism was finished.

Vox’s 2023 deal with Penske Media was less brutal but more revealing. Jay Penske, who built his fortune in motorsports media and entertainment trade publications, took the largest outside stake at a valuation that halved Vox’s 2015 mark. Vox now sits in a bigger portfolio alongside media commentary and taste-curation outfits. These brands continue to elevate cultural trends, but they are more about vibes than news. Their editorial ambitions have been quietly downsized. This is what survival looks like.

The Byron Allen acquisition of BuzzFeed is the most candid of the three transactions — and the most instructive. Allen is not a journalist. He is a Detroit-born comedian who built a syndication and distribution empire from a foundation in 1990s television production. He owns 13 broadcast affiliates across ABC, CBS, and NBC; 10 cable networks, most prominently the Weather Channel, which he bought in 2018; four streaming platforms; and a two-hour late-night comedy block on CBS that just expanded into Stephen Colbert’s old slot. He understands the economics of distribution. 

When Allen looked at BuzzFeed, he did not see a journalism asset. We can imagine that he saw three things. He saw a recognizable brand, nostalgia for which could be monetized. He saw a content library of two decades of audience-tested digital material that could be licensed to an AI company. And he saw an integration opportunity: his BuzzFeed could feed his streaming infrastructure, with the hope of growing ad revenue. He said as much in his announcement: “Our vision is to build on the iconic foundation of BuzzFeed and HuffPost by expanding into free-streaming video, audio, and user-generated content. As of this moment, with the power of AI, BuzzFeed is officially chasing YouTube to become another premier free video streaming service.”

Note what is absent from that sentence: any reference to journalism, reporting, or news. Note also the AI mention. Peretti’s new title, head of BuzzFeed AI, is the giveaway. The asset Allen is buying is not the company. It is two decades of human-written content that can be used to train AI systems, plus a brand name under which machine-generated content can plausibly run. The Reuters licensing deal at $200 million annually, the OpenAI partnership announcements, and the recent Disney-OpenAI billion-dollar deal: these are not isolated transactions. They are the new revenue model. Publishers’ archives have become a training data inventory. Their brand names have become trust-laundering vessels.

For buyers of declining new-media brands, there are three distinct logics that overlap.

The first is distribution integration. A company like Allen Media Group, which owns broadcast and streaming pipes, can use a content brand to fill those pipes more cheaply than it can produce original content. The economics are roughly the ones William Randoph Hearst used in the 1920s, when his magazines fed his newspapers, and his newspapers fed his radio stations. The form is updated; the structure is identical.

The second is intellectual-property licensing. The archives have value as content libraries that can be repackaged for streaming, podcasts, or, increasingly, AI training. Vice’s old documentaries get licensed. BuzzFeed’s listicles get repurposed into vertical video. The journalism, where it ever existed, becomes incidental to the intellectual-property play.

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The third is what we might call brand-laundering. A trusted-sounding brand name carries value beyond the journalism that originally built that trust. Algorithmic content running under “BuzzFeed” or “Vice” carries credibility freight that the same content would not carry under its own name. This is why the brands survive even when the newsrooms don’t. The empty shell is the asset.

The dominant theme is that none of these logics requires the people who originally made the brand worth anything. Once the talent left, the shell still had financial value. Not as a journalism business, but as a content asset, a brand asset, and an audience asset, monetized in ways the original founders never imagined and would not have wanted.

What this tells us about the state of the media industry in 2026 is not subtle. The mid-tier digital publisher is dead. The economics that briefly sustained newsrooms of 200 or 300 journalists at outlets like BuzzFeed and Vice no longer exist. Programmatic advertising has collapsed. Google’s AI overviews have throttled search referral traffic. Facebook deprioritized news years ago. Apple’s privacy changes wrecked targeted-ad economics. The only viable models left are very small (Substack, individual subscriptions) or very large (The New York Times, with its 11 million digital subscribers, has functionally replaced the regional newspaper system as the country’s national paper of record). Everything in between is being either absorbed into the very large or stripped for parts by the financiers.

The consolidation logic has reshaped every other consumer industry over the past two decades. Private equity buys the brand, fires the staff, and runs out the residual value of the customer relationship until it runs dry. Gannett, MediaNews, Tribune Publishing, McClatchy: the American local-newspaper system was hollowed out this way over 15 years by hedge funds like Alden Global Capital. Digital media are now experiencing their own such moment, abbreviated and accelerated. What took the local papers a decade and a half is taking the new-media companies about six years.

The familiar pieties about democratization will not survive contact with this story. The new media was supposed to break the gatekeeping monopolies of legacy publishers. It did so, briefly, replacing them with venture-funded shells whose economics were never sustainable. But once those shells collapsed, the gatekeeping has reconstituted in a more thorough form than before — we used to have gatekeepers at a constellation of local papers; now there’s only The New York Times.

This is the lesson of the last decade, and it is older than the internet. Disruption is rarely what the disruptors claim it is. It is more often a redistribution of who collects the rent.

This strange plan — with a soupçon of science fiction about it, due to the odd device of the cut-off point, achieved by raising the legal smoking age by one year, every year — is a minor reminder that Rishi Sunak was ever prime minister. Our Glorious Leader Keir Starmer seems to have been with us for so long now — like a kind of political psoriasis — that it seems oddly time-warping to recall that it was only two years ago that the “loveless landslide” happened, making lady columnists feel “fruity” and their male counterparts deeply relieved that “the adults” were “back in the room”.

But before him, there was that nice Mr Sunak, who once admitted at the age of 21, in a 2001 television program called Middle Classes: Their Rise and Sprawl, that he had no working-class friends: “I have friends who are aristocrats, I have friends who are upper-class, I have friends who are working-class…well, not working-class.” Though it’s cringey and shallow (would he dare to have transposed his bubble so openly from class to race?), one might applaud Sunak for simply speaking the truth; the classes are as savagely divided as they were in D.H. Lawrence’s day, probably more so due to the end of the grammar schools. Still, the patronizing paternalism of the smoking Bill, the lack of regard for personal freedom and the perception of the uni-party as a bunch of busybodies who always know better than you what’s best for you, makes it clear for the nth time why we are looking at a landscape in which Reform could replace the Conservatives as the opposition.

Not since Churchill’s cigar has a smoking politician been so identified by his habit as Nigel Farage, who is believed to be a 20-a-day man, even when in the I’m A Celebrity jungle. His man-of-the-people shtick — despite his expensive education and considerable wealth — has been established by the image of him at ease with a pint in one hand and a fag in the other; the pull of hedonism is a great leveler. He called Sunak’s plan “pious grandstanding”; last year, during the Tobacco and Vapes Bill’s report stage, he made a brilliant speech in the Commons: “I have to say, I find the tone of moral superiority in the chamber this afternoon almost unbearable… You clearly believe you are better human beings than those outside of here who choose to pursue activities that you perhaps would not. Well, it’s a bit of a shock, I suppose, to some of you, but there are some of us that like a smoke. We even go for a few pints at the pub. We have a punt on the horses. I even attempt to have the odd doughnut… Because we want to have fun. We want to make our own minds up. You can educate. You can tell us. You can give us the facts. But the idea that this place should make those decisions for other people shows me that the spirit of Oliver Cromwell is alive and well.”

Farage may be pushing it a bit when he heralds smokers as the “heroes of the nation” due to the huge taxes they contribute now that a packet of fags is pushing 20 quid. But he has a point: over 80% of the cost of a packet is tax, meaning that tobacco duty and VAT on smokeables bung the Exchequer around £8 billion a year whereas treating smoking-related illnesses is thought to cost the NHS around £2 billion. Then there’s the brisk “Net Saver” argument, which posits that as smokers often die younger, they save a vast amount of public money which might be spent on we oldsters, including our pensions and care homes.

Farage has it right when he leans into the pub as an important liberty bellwether. It’s telling to compare the delighted reaction of drinkers when Farage walks into a pub with the loathing felt towards Labour politicians, which became so extreme last winter that 250 pubs banned them. 

Looking back, the indoor smoking ban of 2007, under the Blair/Brown government, was the start of the current existential trouble which pubs find themselves in: one a day closes permanently now. That the government finally understands that it has pushed the hospitality industry too far was indicated by the fact that they pulled back from the proposed ban on smoking in pub gardens in 2024 — but it’s too late now. It’s poignant to recall that the name “public house” came about at a time when many actual houses where the poor lived were barren; the pubs ensured that the working classes had somewhere warm and welcoming to go to. Now that homes once more risk being dark and cold when the summer’s gone, many people will have to walk further to find a friendly light.

Does prohibition ever work? The tobacco black market is already huge. Christopher Snowdon, an economist at the Institute of Economic Affairs, said of Sunak’s strange legacy: “You’re going to have a fairly large, informal market of smokers who are old enough to buy cigarettes selling cigarettes to people who are not old enough. The problem with prohibition isn’t that it doesn’t have any effect whatsoever on consumption — the problem with prohibition is it leads to massive black markets and a lot of tax revenues gone.” So in its crazed compulsion to control the personal behavior of its citizens, the government will make itself far poorer — but bossiness is its own reward, if you’re that way inclined. 

Already, plenty of vaping shops sell contraband foreign fags on the cheap. The one nearest me sells “illicit whites”, literally from under the counter; manufactured in the UAE and China, they are around half the price of legal smokes. They taste like they’ve been produced by the government to put people off smoking, but they sell like hotcakes. They even have the mandatory gory health-warning pics on them, to make them look legal. Surely the kids will end up buying these — or else take up vaping. A primary school teacher I know says it’s not unusual for nine-year-olds to be enthusiastic and habitual vapers. It sounds like vapes have caused more problems than they’ve solved.

Why doesn’t the government treat the alcohol industry with similar ruthlessness? More than 10,000 people a year in the UK die from alcohol-specific causes. Alcohol abuse costs the NHS £4.9 billion, enough to pay the salaries of almost half the nurses in England; it costs the state £27 billion through everything from lost productivity to violent crime. So why not put photographs of beaten-up women on cans of strong beer? Or mangled cars on premium spirits? No one ever took a life because they had one too many fags.

I realize that I’m not a typical smoker. A pack will last me a week — and that’s shared with my husband. It would never occur to me to get the gaspers out at home; I only ever fancy one after a nice lunch out. I daresay I’m ignoring the science. But there are odd glitches in the modern mentality which insists that smoking is a social evil beyond all others. The Green Party plans to legalize crack cocaine while agreeing with the paternalistic attitude of the mainstream parties towards phasing out smoking. Last week, a report was released suggesting counterintuitively that young non-smokers who eat lots of fruit and vegetables may be more likely to develop lung cancer. “Have your 5 a day — and pass away!” was a public health message we never predicted. In 2023, the World Health Organization claimed that loneliness is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day; yes, smoking can kill, but the urge to make friends over a cheeky fag in the freezing cold is a life-enhancing one.

Maybe I’m swayed by my own peculiar olfactory tastes. One of the dumbest lines about smoking — so dumb that anyone who utters it immediately identifies themselves as a half-wit — is “It would be like kissing an ashtray!” Personally, I find the scent of fresh smoking attractive, like fresh sweat, though of course nothing is nice when it’s stale. Many perfumes use tobacco as a “note” —Tom Ford’s Tobacco Vanille is particularly lush. 

My first remembered smell is that of my father, who had smoked 30 un-tipped Woodbines a day since he was a kid. He died of mesothelioma, which he contracted as a teenage boy working on the building of one of the proliferation of NHS hospitals after the war; of damage caused by tobacco, there was no trace. As with so many health-related issues, so much of it really is the — excuse the pun — luck of the draw.

Silver must have been livid. Yet in a sense, he helped make this moment happen. A decade ago, he took to the pages of The New York Times to call for legalizing sports betting nationwide. The argument then sounded pragmatic: Americans were already gambling illegally, so why not bring it into the open, regulate it, and tax it? What Silver helped set in motion was the merger of sport and speculation — a regime in which the game itself becomes an advertising vehicle for constant wagering, and every fan morphs into a potential bettor.

Once, gambling was the seedy underbelly of sports culture, the business of backroom bookmakers and shady offshore sites. Now it’s the official sponsor of the pregame show, the banner scrolling under highlight clips, the push notification buzzing our smartphones. Players, coaches, and fans alike have been folded into a vast machine that monetizes the uncertainty that makes sport so compelling to begin with.

The scandals were bound to multiply. Toronto Raptors power forward Jontay Porter’s lifetime ban last year for betting on his “over/under” stat line was a canary in the coal mine. Major League Baseball soon faced its own embarrassment with the Cleveland Guardians’ reliever Emmanuel Clase and pitcher Luis Ortiz placed on leave amid gambling investigations. Each time, the league officials express shock. Each time, they pretend these incidents are isolated. But when you turn the entire emotional economy of sport into a betting market, moral rot is just a cost of doing business.

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I used to sympathize with the liberalizers. I thought legalization could make gambling safer, draw it out of the shadows, and starve organized crime. It was the same logic many of us on the Left used for dealing with other vices: regulate, don’t prohibit; treat people like adults; reduce harm.

But what we’ve seen since 2018 — the year the US Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports betting — isn’t harm reduction. It’s market expansion on a scale that would have astonished the old mobsters of Las Vegas. In less than a decade, 39 states and Washington, DC, have legalized wagering. Americans legally bet $148 billion on sports last year, billions more than the gross domestic product of entire countries. And that’s just the above-board total.

The total volume of betting, legal and illegal, is likely much higher than it was before 2018. This shouldn’t be surprising: when you normalize and advertise a vice, you don’t just displace the old market, you expand it. Imagine a black market where two people are harming themselves at a certain quantifiable level. Legalization might, in theory and with the right regulations, lower individual harm, but by expanding participation, it increases the total amount of suffering.

After all, what changed in the last few years isn’t just the law, it’s the technology and marketing that power the gambling industry. Betting used to require effort: making a trip to Vegas or at least knowing a local bookie and dropping off an envelope of cash with him. Then it required tech savvy: navigating sketchy offshore sites, converting cash in and out of Bitcoin. Now it requires nothing more than turning 18, owning a phone, and linking a credit card. Push notifications nudge users to “get back in the game.” Algorithms track every habit and weakness. The house no longer waits for you to walk in, because it already lives in your pocket.

Every industry now traffics in behavioral addiction, but sports betting weaponizes it with a particular cruelty. The product being sold is not a physical high or even an illusion of connection — it’s the brief jolt of predictive mastery, the feeling that you understand something about the game that others don’t. And when you lose, the next tap offers a chance to win it back.

The results are visible everywhere. Gambling helplines across the country report record call volumes, mostly from men in their 20s and 30s. Surveys show nearly 40% of young men admit they’re betting more than they can afford. Some are wagering their rent money, while others are just dealing with small debts that make their lives a little more frustrating and unpredictable.

Yet there’s no real political appetite to reverse course. Many Republicans invoke freedom when arguing against the “nanny state.” Some Democrats see a new tax base and a new way to undercut organized crime. Even worse, the media are literally bought: ESPN runs its own sportsbook, and podcasts on new media outlets like The Ringer are sponsored by the very companies they should be scrutinizing. In this world, the idea that sports should embody integrity sounds almost absurdly old-fashioned.

But integrity and decommodification are two things we need more of.

A healthy society doesn’t eliminate every vice, but it draws lines. It understands that some freedoms corrode the conditions that make freedom meaningful. The case for recriminalizing bookmaking and banning betting from the airwaves isn’t an extreme form of paternalism. Rather, it’s about creating friction again through banning live-betting apps, curbing nonstop ads, and making it harder for gambling to reach people before common sense does. We don’t need to prosecute individuals who gamble, but we do need to dismantle the infrastructure that invites and normalizes it.

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For all our talk about “harm reduction,” there’s something perverse about designing digital opium dens and calling it liberty. The Left, at its best, has always believed that society should cultivate the conditions for a good life. And a good life doesn’t involve compulsively wagering on the performance of 20-year-old sports stars and DMing them death threats if they lose you money (yes, this happens).

But beyond the individual toll that rising addiction has on people, we’re going to see a mounting crisis of trust in sports. Sports offer a rare civic commons, a place where our differences recede before the live drama of chance and skill. When every play is a potential payout, that trust evaporates. If you look at the discourse around athletes and especially umpires, it’s clear that fans increasingly see a rigged spectacle instead of the purity of competition.

In that sense, the growth of gambling represents more than a policy failure. It’s a cultural catastrophe. It reveals how little confidence we have left in collective meaning. The rituals that once bound us together have been turned into platforms for extraction. The market doesn’t merely exploit our appetites; it shapes them, then sells us the means of our own disintegration.

Across the political spectrum, people should demand that Congress thinks about more than profit and starts helping us draw moral boundaries around our beloved pastimes. We live in a cynical era, one where even virtue seems performative. But if we want to rebuild trust — in one another, in the games we love, in the idea of fairness itself — we have to start somewhere.

The young get old and revolutions end up eating their own: and the death of the flagship Vice News Tonight show and drastic downsizing of the Vice News platform, just days after the closing of Buzzfeed News, heralds the closing of the era when the New York new media giants bestrode the news world like strutting conquerors. With the heavily indebted Vice empire reportedly circling on the edge of bankruptcy, and struggling to find a buyer, the media landscape of the 2010s already looks like history. As Ben Judah observed: “The early 2010s were a moment where Buzzfeed News and Vice News gave you the impression you didn’t have to do journalism like the New York Times or the BBC. Them shuttering is telling us, actually, there’s only the way they do it at the New York Times and the BBC.”

Back then, the world looked very different. When the Vice News channel launched on YouTube in 2014, its parent company’s reputation for achingly arch and semi-ironically offensive content aimed at jaded hipsters caused legacy broadcasters to scoff at the idea of their cocky, inexperienced journalists challenging them on their own turf. Within months, their laughter stopped: networks such as the BBC and CNN were now terrified that Vice held the key to the future of news. Vice News went where no one else would go, gaining access to the most difficult stories, and throwing itself into the thickest action with studied indifference. Young people, who had always been disregarded as news consumers, were enraptured by the hard-edged, thrilling content from the worst places on earth; elderly execs and money men threw sponsorship at the company in an attempt to capture some of the magic for their own ailing brands. The future of news was young and online, and there was no going back.

Historians of the craft of newsgathering will record that Vice News changed the visual grammar of the medium. By marrying a cinematic visual style with the tempo and immediacy of breaking stories, and pioneering the use of handheld DSLR cameras, Vice News re-aestheticised TV news. And by having its young reporters talk casually to the audience, like friends, in the middle of the world’s worst chaos, the old world of buttoned-up correspondents stiffly lecturing the camera suddenly looked like a relic from the age of black and white. But while the big networks quickly learned to copy Vice’s style to the point it has become the norm, the fundamental challenge of all news broadcasting — how to make the most difficult and expensive content on earth pay for itself — had still not been solved. In the end, it was all a mirage.

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As is the nature of the trade, it was always a source of pride, and of glittering awards, to obtain better combat footage than anyone else: always getting closer to the action, dancing at the edge of death like a gladiator in the amphitheatre for the audience’s thrill and delectation. The highest word of praise from an exec was “gnarly”. But what neither fans nor critics of what they saw as our recklessness understood was that the “bang-bang” was merely a vehicle with which to smuggle in serious analytical reportage of poorly-understood conflicts and revolutions. Vice’s central insight was that if you framed the story right, and shot it well enough, you could persuade teens and early twentysomethings to watch in-depth explorations of Syrian rebel justice systems, or the intricacies of South Sudan’s civil war. Middle-aged execs from traditional networks had always claimed young people didn’t care about granular detail, or distant wars in Africa: but this (apart from stories about drugs) was always by far the most popular content, judging from YouTube views and comments. The audience never demands dumbing-down: viewers want nuance, shades of grey, and moral ambiguity. They want to see the world as it is, not as it ought to be.

While the rewards in the early days were mismatched to the risk, the degree of experience offered to young journalists was unrivalled, a huge draw to those with an adventurous streak. Journalists at the beginning of their careers were given access to stories the networks reserved for their hardened veterans, and repaid that trust with a fervid dedication to their craft. I was a green 31-year-old reporter when I started, with only the Libyan war, Tunisian revolution and a strange months-long sojourn with tribal rebels in Sudan under my belt. Vice gave me the freedom to follow the Malian army into bloody battle against jihadist rebels, experience the Egyptian coup from the Islamist side, return to Syria over and over again during the course of the war and follow the Isis story from their initially underplayed rise to their final desert gotterdammerung.

And like Isis, Vice was a 2010s phenomenon that wrongly thought it could take on the giants and win. Perhaps that strange kinship between the decade’s two great disruptors is why Vice News was the only western network Isis let embed with them in Syria and Iraq. This isn’t as wild as it sounds – Isis watched us and we watched them. As the Syria reporter for years, focusing on Isis, I watched the terrorist group copy Vice’s style in their videos as Very Online western millennials took over their output, syncing cinematic DSLR footage with hypnotic music and thrilling action sequences.

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Young Western Isis fighters and social media influencers were constantly messaging me on Twitter, critiquing my films, and either asking me to join them or threatening to kidnap and behead me next time I deployed. I have the unusual distinction, as a legacy of my time at Vice News, of having featured in three Isis videos, twice using extracts from my films, and once combat footage of them shooting (unbeknown to them at the time) at my Landcruiser. Isis won the video battle: they had the resources of a state behind them, a demonic desire to shock and horrify, and could orchestrate combat for the cameras. But ultimately neither could maintain their exponential growth beyond the 2010s: both had dramatically overestimated their chance of taking over the world.

Careering skyward after their Isis scoop, Vice upped the sponsorship stakes with a deal to make HBO a prestigious nightly news series: and when the new network execs came in to run the show, Vice purged the young and idealistic journalists who had risked their lives to win the hipster bible journalistic credibility. Friends and colleagues who had risked their lives to produce groundbreaking coverage from Ukraine, Syria and the Central African Republic were let go with a lack of sentiment unusual even by the standards of America’s media industry. Vice News gave Vice the credibility to raise money from investors to furiously expand the rest of its brand, but the newsgathering itself was too expensive to sustain. For a while, Vice was making money, but little went to the journalists who originally built the brand.

Even still, the common online narrative that the glossier “new Vice” was a paltry shadow of “old Vice” is hard to maintain. Under the new regime, journalists were paid well, and professional security advisors were brought in to ensure the company never paid the toll in deaths that other networks gossiped were just about to happen. In any case, Vice News’s most sustained string of awards came under the new management, and some of the work from Syria that I am most proud of came under the nightly HBO banner, along with my only Emmy. Even up to the very end, long after the now-greying old hands like me had moved out to pasture, Vice News’s coverage of conflicts in Afghanistan, Yemen and Ukraine outclassed the world’s biggest networks, raking in awards: Vice News Tonight closes with more Emmy nominations than any of its big name rivals for five years running.

Perhaps what really destroyed Vice News’s hope of making TV news into a profitable industry was the rise of Trump. The political polarisation of American life after 2016 saw viewers drift away from whatever interest they showed in confusing wars in far-off places for an obsession with their own internal conflict. The legacy cable networks such as CNN, MSNBC and Fox revived their ailing fortunes through a constant focus on the Trump reality show, and the rest of the world retreated back into obscurity — unless it could be viewed through Trump’s prism. As the online world polarised, Vice’s original YouTube fanbase, which skewed young male and often hard Right, vocally resented the radically progressive orientation of much of the company’s new output.

At the same time every publication from the New York Times to Teen Vogue began speaking in the same voice, Vice no longer sounded distinct. The punk magazine-turned-megabrand had gone corporate, and now sounded like any other American corporation, only more so. Vice, which had won acclaim for dispassionately showing viewers how the world really is, now looked excessively concerned with its own virtue. As American society polarised, Vice could never fully capture the newly divided, inward-looking zeitgeist – stunts like reading the entire Mueller Report live on air for four hours didn’t possess quite the same old magic. HBO switched its patronage to newer, DC insider platforms such as Axios, showing the world as viewed from the top down, not the bottom up, and Vice News moved to new and less lucrative deals on smaller cable networks. While the quality of foreign coverage remained high, and awards kept piling up, the ambition dwindled. Vice had set out to conquer the legacy broadcasters, but found itself reliant on their largesse to keep the show on the road.

For a few short years, Vice News looked like it had found the secret to making news pay by showing viewers the world as it really is, far from Western capitals, rubbing viewers’ noses in the darkness of reality. But news is expensive and talk is cheap: we have reverted to an era of talking heads and studio debates, where perhaps only state broadcasters have the funding and desire to present their chosen images of reality to the outside world, with all that implies. Bored young men who want to see brutal images of combat can now get their kicks watching Ukraine snuff clips on Twitter. For good or ill — I still can’t decide — working for Vice News over seven years forcefully reshaped my worldview, by confronting my original impeccably liberal assumptions about how the world worked with constant immersion in the hard reality of tribal, religious and ethnic conflict. Young and idealistic, I thought I could change the world: instead the world changed me.

But as my old colleague, Vice News’ former Latin America bureau chief and chronicler of Mexico’s bloody internal conflict Daniel Hernandez wrote in an elegy on Twitter, “It was truly about going to countries that ‘didn’t matter’, diving into gnarly security situations — it’s a miracle no one — for conflict reporting in Syria, Ukraine, Mexico, Venezuela … Just a wild, idealistic time. Honored to have been there at its birth.” Vice News was the future, once. If even they can’t make hard foreign news pay, then perhaps it has no future.