From an excellent New Yorker magazine story this week about Vice Media, the controversy-seeking online network targeting young male consumers, a market also plumbed by USA Today's action-sports subsidiary, BNQT. This helps explain Gannett's hot pursuit of video.
In recent years, Vice has been engaged in an energetic process of growing up—both commercially and in terms of journalistic ambition. It now has 35 offices in 18 countries, from Poland to Brazil. It operates a record label, which, in 2002, began putting out albums by such of-the-moment bands as Bloc Party and the Raveonettes; book and film divisions (Vice recently helped market the R-rated Spring Breakers, directed by Harmony Korine); a suite of websites; and an in-house ad agency. These ventures are united by Vice’s ambition to become a kind of global MTV on steroids. According to Shane Smith, Vice’s CEO, “The over-all aim, the over-all goal is to be the largest network for young people in the world.”
"To be the largest network for young people in the world" is their goal. Hardly. It's not for young people; it's for profit. Their vaunted "over-all" goal is to dumb-down and monopolize an artificial market, period — screw young people. It's an insult to all young people to imagine that this enterprise is some universal attraction.
ReplyDeleteWhich makes it different from Disneyland or your local school system in what way? Each seeks to capture a "market". In Arizona, where charter schools are everywhere, public schools actually advertise for students. Competition will do that.
ReplyDelete