How VICE News Tonight Got the Charlottesville Scoop
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Josh Tyrangiel, formerly of Time magazine and MTV and Vice News and Bloomberg BusinessWeek was a guest on the News Items with John Ellis podcast. He does not usually do interviews and yet is remains of the more interesting media types, transitioning almost seamlessly from print media to television as digital rose. He’s sort of a media Zelig — if that reference doesn’t date me too much. But his story on how VICE News got the Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally scoop was really interesting to me as a longtime media observer of the white supremacist zeitgeist.
His critique of the Evening News, and reinventing the nightly news for VICE:
TYRANGIEL: “... I watched some of the network nightly news and I thought ...
JOHN ELLIS: “--- Jumped rout the window (laughter).
TYRANGIEL: “-- And realized what the hell is this? I mean, literally, what the hell is this. I mean, I don't understand this. The sort of structure around the anchor. Every story starts the same with the same bad writing and the same two second sound up. And its inefficient.
JOHN ELLIS: “Right
TYRANGIEL: “If I actually wanted this content --in two minutes of reading online I would be equally as well-informed. So you need a half hour of my time and I have to deal with all your terrible cliches and this? Some of it was just like: OK, we could do better. And there was a decision early on that an anchor is a bad signal. Even by then when I was taking over in 2015, there was no single person any diverse group of Americans trust. That just doesn't exist. So a lot of this was just built upon this skepticism of mediation, and can we get the reporters out of the way of being a mediator between the story and the audience as quickly as possible.
JOHN ELLIS: “Right
TYRANGIEL: “And they should appear only when needed. So that was one precept. The other was just that most of what our competition was doing were studio shows because talk is cheap. And Shane (Smith), to his credit, was willing to invest almost all of the money HBO gave him into getting cameras out to places almost nobody was interested in going. And when you don't have ad breaks, a story doesn't need to be two minutes. Doesn't need to be four minutes. If you build up this relationship with your audience which we did very successfully, some nights they'll give you the license to do 22 minutes on one story because that's the only thing that fucking matters.
“We built it. It was harrowing. It was the most difficult project of my career by far. After a couple of months on the air the audience number was pretty solid, and then we sort of had a proof of concept in Charlottesville, which was I trusted a reporter named Ellee Reeve who said, 'listen, something unique is about to happen, which is that an online hate movement is about to jump into real life and I think we need to be there for this.' And I said 'yeah, that's what we're here for.' She's a very good reporter. She had great access. We sent two crews. You know Friday night I believe of that weekend was the tiki torch rally, Saturday morning was the counter rally. I knew that something fairly big was happening down there. By Sunday night, the footage was back in Williamsburg. I went into the office with an editor. We cut down 4 hours into 32 minutes. Monday morning Ellie deployed to the secret hotel room of the organizer of the rally and Monday night we put on a 25 minute episode of everything that happened inside the alt right, which presaged everything that is going down inside QAnon and lots of other movements. So that was an incredibly gratifying project that does not happen without some real risk taking from Shane (Smith) and Richard.
And on his 5-tear deal at Apple TV-plus
TYRANGIEL: "They are basically paying Richard (Plepler) for his taste. And so I run the documentary side of Richard's business."
Full interview here.