by T.J. Lane, Write2Market Senior Account Supervisor
If it’s dangerous, weird, edgy, or compelling, new news service Vice has probably covered it. Adopting a guerrilla immersive approach to journalism, Vice reporting is gritty and uncensored. It’s also hard to turn away from.
Vice reporters fully engage in bizarre situations and with dangerous people, presenting stories using a first person documentary style narrative. They hang out with people like Liberian cannibal warlords and church burning black metal singers to tell their stories. Often throwing their own safety aside, Vice reporters travel to places like North Korea to see what it’s really like to live there.
There’s no doubt that Vice is onto something big and different, the only question is whether the market will adopt it wholesale. But the story for marketers is, if guerrilla video journalism becomes a new paradigm in the future, what are the implications for your media strategy?
What stories would resonate most with an outlet like Vice and how would they need to be pitched? What could it mean for journalism, for marketers and for public relations, if more outlets adopt a Vice-like approach? Some interesting things here that public relations, media and marketing folks will want to follow:
- I’m a newshound and I love VICE — my advice is to watch this trend closely and think about what opportunities it presents.
- The beta launch is getting some attention, and there’s been some online chatter about it this week.
- Don’t believe everything in that article. The New York Times may have an adversarial relationship with Vice, but CNN.com has had a long-time partnership with Vice, distributing its content on a special section of the site.
- There is no official launch date yet for Vice News, but sign up to get access to the beta site and monitor how it evolves.
You can also look at a lot of archives on Vice’s Youtube channel. You’re bound to find coverage of a topic you can relate to. And if re-positioning your media strategy and storytelling to a more populist position makes sense, we would love to kickstart that conversation with you. The new media story telling team at Write2market are looking forward to using this trend to help our clients tell their tech and business publicity stories even more strongly.