VICE has come a long way from free magazine promoting drug use and mocking fashion disasters, becoming one of the few authentic news outlets attempting to show what’s actually going on via immersion journalism.
Their Youtube channels have been pumping out a steady stream of unconventional news content for years now and as their HBO show reaches season 3, it looks like the network wants to go all in with the company. VICE is now set to get a nightly news broadcast on the premium cable channel. From The AV Club:
HBO has also agreed to expand each season of the show from 14 to 38 episodes, as well as air 32 new specials that Vice will produce for the pay-cable channel between now and 2018.
That’s a lot of content, and a lot of guys in Buddy Holly glasses almost being blown to pieces by stray mortars. But that’s not even the biggest project to come out of the deal—that would be Vice’s new half-hour nightly news broadcast for HBO, which will air five days a week, 48 weeks a year, through 2018 at least. HBO is also launching a new, Vice-branded channel on its forthcoming HBO Now streaming service, which will operate alongside the already-extant Vice News website. This will be HBO’s first nightly newscast.
And it couldn’t happen to a more worthy news outlet. Some might mock VICE for its hipster appeal, but you can’t ignore the fact that they’re the some of the only ones with cameras on the ground in the worst parts of the Middle East, Russia, and other hot spots, filming what’s going on and letting the viewers make up their own minds about what they capture.
Other major news networks rely more and more on talking heads from Washington think tanks, blathering on about expertise and regurgitating talking points that benefit whoever pays the bills.
If even a quarter of the population paid attention to the issues and stories VICE raised, we might at least realize we could be horribly f*cked as a society over the next hundred years. Then when we’re living in our post-apocalyptic shelters eating soylent green we can tell our friends/future food sources that we knew what was up before everything went to hell.
It will be the hipster way to experience the apocalypse. We knew we were doomed before it was cool.
(Via The AV Club)
