You can be silly and be authentic most of the time, and then once in a while when you say something about the truth, people will listen.
I love that line in Ghostbusters: ""Let's say this Twinkie represents the normal amount of psychokinetic energy in the New York area."[1] It stupid and silly, hell its Ghostbusters, but the scene is an authentic template of many idiotic and funny explanations you witness in random casual conversation, as well as being pretty much a template for all latter day Bill Murray scenes.
McInnes' view on writing--"just write a letter to your brother but take out all the inside jokes"--has been almost completely abandoned in the magazine.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzaQjS1JstY
EDIT: typo
High-quality, prestigious yellow journalism. Remember the Maine!
Of course, they weren't perfect, but when they did sensationalize or exaggerate, I think it was a bit more harmless than most news sources. Everyone is doing it to sell ad space, but Vice tended to sensationalize stories that were weird rather than stories that created fear or outrage--their sensationalism was less politicized.
EDIT: To be clear, I'm talking about Vice a while back, not Vice now. The changes mentioned in the article are already apparent in some of what Vice is doing these days.
There was also a questionable story by Vice about the Nigerian military fighting militants recently and the supposedly embedded reporter made zero mention that the entire crew in the attacking helicopters they filmed in were not Nigerian. Hey why do the gunners and pilots have white arms? Are they mercenaries? British pilots? South African? Who knows Vice never bothered to tell us.
They probably know that their audience trusts them as a source of news, but they also know that the wider perception of them is not as a trusted source.
This amazes me: what makes them think that they aren't a trusted source of news for their audience?
> With expansion comes a sense of responsibility,” he told me recently in one of Vice’s glass-walled conference rooms. “As time goes on I don’t think that being silly, being stupid, is cool anymore. When you look at the planet, at the state that it’s in, it demands attention. It demands scrutiny. And it demands a certain level of seriousness.”
Could it be that it's exactly the lack of seriousness of Vice's reporting up to this point that has made people trust them? Reality isn't always serious, and when it is, sometimes the only way to deal with it is to laugh at it, or to admit that it's strange.
In short, this looks like yet another company getting big and then changing everything that made them successful. It's not necessarily going to hurt their bottom line, but it's an example of why companies getting big is bad for consumers.