IBC
When Sir Martin Sorrell, the Chief Executive of WPP, the world's largest advertising agency, was asked how best to understand the new media landscape he referred to Vice.
“They understand how millennials think, what content millennials want,” he said.
WPP owns a 10% stake in Vice so perhaps there's an element of self-interest. But 'old media' investors are lining up to grab a slice of this hot property.
21st Century Fox paid $70 million for a 5 per cent stake, Disney chairman Bob Iger, MTV co-founder Tom Freston and Disney/Hearst-owned network A+E Networks have joined suit helping to value the 21-year-old youth publisher over $2.5 billion and rising.
Vice began as a punk magazine in Montreal and moved online seven years ago. It attracts the broadband generation to channels including Motherboard (covering technology), Noisey (a music discovery channel) and a food channel called Munchies.
It already had a reputation for gonzo-style journalism posted from hotspots of war and crime, before it formalised those video reports into Vice News in March 2014. Vice News has since become the fastest growing such channel on YouTube, gaining 1.1 million subscribers and 175 million video views as of early 2015.
Characterised by Vice founder Shane Smith as “the CNN of the street”, in its most recent deal it extended a partnership with HBO which will see Vice produce a daily news programme and have its own branded channel on the HBO Now streaming service.
“Basically, as a news organization Vice is no different than anybody else,” Kevin Sutcliffe, Vice Media’s Head of News Programmes for Europe told Chatham House, The Royal Institute Of International Affairs earlier this year. “You’ve got to trust us. Getting it wrong is extraordinarily damaging. So it’s very old fashioned, that’s one of the basic bases of journalism.”
Its success, with that of fellow news disrupter Buzzfeed, is no surprise to Vice executives who believe traditional news organizations hold a misguided assumption that millennials are not interested in learning about the world.
“A great American word is to bloviate, which is basically to sit around chatting all day long on the news channels,” said Sutcliffe, a former editor of Channel 4 current affairs strand Dispatches who was hired to launch the channel. “Vice News is absolutely a response to that. We have a form of journalism that is immersive, raw, embedded and authentic.”
Sutcliffe, who has criticised BBC journalism and current affairs as “institutionalised” and “beige”, said Vice disagreed that youth audiences were apathetic about news.
“It’s just how it was being presented that was the issue... formatting is out of date, it’s run its course, it talks down to people, it is not representative of 16 to 35 year olds. It skews very old and that’s because it doesn’t speak to them,” he argued.
“With that in the back of our minds we tried to make what we think is a different form of television news and documentary. What does that look like? It looks like ‘Ambushed in South Sudan’, a film where two of our journalists go on a journey with the South Sudanese army to take a town. It’s a 25 minute film in which you experience this army trying to take a town and then retreating under fire. It’s an experiential documentary where you learn more about Africa, African wars, African people. It’s very up close, it’s very personal. That’s a hallmark of Vice News’ journalism: you’re in the mix with the story, with the journalist, with the people you’re meeting. It’s character driven and it’s immersive.”
That seems to have touched a nerve by attracting large audiences to documentaries about the coup in Mali, the Ukraine conflict and, most notoriously, a documentary which embedded Vice News with the Islamic State.
“It was a global moment in terms of media because we remain the only media organisation to have got inside and been able to film with the Islamic State and got out,” said Sutcliffe. “That showed how we operate, which is a very raw and unmediated way.”
That Vice News is online is also an advantage since it is not tied to a particular schedule or format. “People now want authenticity,” said Sutcliffe. “News now does not break in a newsroom. News breaks on Twitter. We’re posting a lot of editorial every day, from around the world, from our writers and a range of video. If you actually look across our output, there’s an incredible range. We’re not competing with a BBC or cable news. We don’t need to fill their hours.”
Kevin Sutcliffe presents 'Online News Case Study: How Vice News is changing the paradigm' at the IBC Conference. Also see ‘The Big Talking Point: The internet era of TV is here, right? So how well is TV tackling the key issues?’
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