Vice News Tonight

» see vice.com/en/section/news as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

HBO had never run a daily show before. It commissioned this one on 10 October 2016, half an hour a night from the company that had spent the previous few years convincing television executives that a generation of viewers would watch news if it did not look like news. Vice News Tonight was the proof of concept, and the format was the argument: no anchor at a desk, and no ad breaks. Correspondents narrated over their own footage and the show cut straight to the next piece.

It worked better than the skepticism around it predicted. The New York Times review said it was new without changing the game, which is roughly where it stayed for three years on HBO, but the reporting kept landing. For five consecutive years it drew more Emmy nominations than any other newscast on American television.

HBO ended it in September 2019 after three seasons. Vice picked it back up on 4 March 2020 for its own cable channel, expanded to a full hour, and ran it for another three years while the company underneath it came apart. The 1,000th episode aired in March 2023. The cancellation came the following month, and the last broadcast was 25 May 2023.

None of this reached Turkey as television. Vice reached me the way it reached most people outside America, as video on the web and a YouTube subscription, which is a strange fate for a show whose whole institutional purpose was to prove that Vice belonged on a real network at a fixed time every weeknight. I watched the Charlottesville report the same year everyone else did, on a laptop, weeks after it aired.

~ the dossier ~

~ charlottesville ~

Elle Reeve and a small crew spent the Unite the Right rally of August 2017 inside the march rather than across the police line from it. What came back was 22 minutes of white nationalists talking freely to a camera they had decided was on their side, followed by the car attack that killed Heather Heyer. Vice put it out as "Charlottesville: Race and Terror" and it went everywhere within a day.

It won a Peabody. Brian Stelter called it the show's breakout moment and he was right, in that the format's one real advantage, a reporter with a camera and no studio to get back to, produced something the networks with anchors and desks could not have produced that week.

~ the second run ~

Moving to Vice TV in 2020 was a demotion in reach and a stay of execution in practice. The HBO version had prestige and a small audience. The cable version had an hour to fill and a much smaller one, on a channel most viewers could not locate in their guide, funded by a company that was already writing down its own valuation from $5.7 billion toward numbers nobody wanted to say out loud.

The journalism held up through all of it, which is the part that reads worst in hindsight. The show kept covering Ukraine and January 6th at full strength while the layoffs moved through the building around it.

~ the last month ~

On 27 April 2023 Vice Media told staff the show was over, as part of a restructuring that cut more than a hundred jobs out of a workforce of 1,500 and pointed the news division at documentaries and digital video. Eighteen days later the company filed for Chapter 11 and agreed to hand itself to its lenders for $225 million in credit, and the last Vice News Tonight went out ten days after that.

Seven years and five straight years at the top of the Emmy field for newscasts, and the show still ended as a line item in a bankruptcy somebody else had filed.

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