Introduction
The wildfires that occurred in the Los Angeles area represent a heartbreaking disaster, with related reports continuing to stir public emotions and attention. This article will analyze reports from two media sources — ABC News, an online news service, with “LA fires aftermath: How people are rebuilding after losing almost everything“ and VICE, a digital-born news service, with “Wildfire: Surreal Photos of Los Angeles in Ashes“ — to reveal the different methods of expression and narrative perspectives adopted by news media when presenting wildfire disasters.
Biographical Overview
ABC News is part of the American Broadcasting Company, which was originally established as a radio network in 1945 and expanded into television in 1948. Since 1996, ABC has been part of The Walt Disney Company, belonging to one of the largest media conglomerates in the world. As a traditional media organization, ABC News operates on a commercial model but is still widely recognized for its reputation in mainstream news reporting and has a broad audience base. Its funding primarily comes from advertising revenue and resources from its parent company. In today’s diverse media landscape, ABC News distributes content through multiple channels including television, radio, and digital platforms, striving to establish itself as a trustworthy mainstream news source that provides comprehensive coverage of domestic and international events. It focuses on fact-based analysis, emphasizes news credibility, and demonstrates a commitment to public accountability.
VICE was founded in 1994 and rapidly grew into a global digital media company. After experiencing multiple ownership changes, VICE Media Group filed for bankruptcy in 2023 and was acquired by a consortium led by Fortress Investment Group, Soros Fund Management, and Monroe Capital. VICE’s funding sources include advertising revenue, branded content partnerships, and content production agreements. As a private commercial media organization, VICE has established its brand image through counter-culture and alternative perspectives, primarily targeting younger audiences. Its market positioning features bold and immersive reporting styles, focusing on topics less covered by mainstream media, excelling in visual storytelling and on-the-ground reporting, and emphasizing experiential, reality-based news expression.
Target User Groups
According to data from SimilarWeb, we can understand the basic user profiles of these two websites and conduct analysis based on this information.
ABC News targets a broad and diverse audience with a relatively balanced age and gender distribution, primarily consisting of American users. Its audience tends to be well-educated and generally seeks in-depth, authentic news reporting. It has considerable trust and influence among mainstream politically engaged populations.
Screenshot of Traffic Demographic of ABC News from SimilarWeb
VICE’s audience is younger, especially viewers between 18-34 years old, with a higher proportion of male viewers. Its content leans toward alternative, avant-garde styles, focusing on lifestyle, culture, and social issues. According to SimilarWeb data, most of VICE.com’s traffic comes from mobile devices, reflecting this group’s activity on social media (such as Instagram, TikTok) and demonstrating the fragmented reading habits of young users.
Screenshot of Traffic Demographic of VICE from SimilarWeb
Screenshot of Device Distribution of VICE from SimilarWeb
ABC News, as a mainstream news organization, primarily attracts middle-aged audiences who hold mainstream values. This group places more emphasis on the authority of reporting and the accuracy of facts. Therefore, ABC’s reporting language is more formal and clearly structured, enhancing credibility through references to government or expert opinions and data, with particular emphasis on event background and reconstruction processes. In contrast, VICE’s target audience is mainly young people, especially Millennial and Gen Z student groups. This demographic prefers visual content, storytelling narratives, and reporting with strong personal attitudes and social perspectives. They tend to obtain information through social platforms and value interactivity and expression space. Therefore, VICE conveys emotional authenticity to viewers through photographer Jamie Lee Taete’s firsthand experiences and emotional reactions.
Due to differences in audience groups, ABC News chooses to highlight the theme of “reconstruction and hope” through linear narratives and in-depth written descriptions, while VICE builds emotional impact through numerous “surreal images” and “first-person perspectives,” creating an immersive “viewing dilemma” experience. This difference in content strategy reflects the diversity of news content production across different media in the digital age.
Writing Analysis
“LA fires aftermath: How people are rebuilding after losing almost everything“ employs a traditional news story structure, rigorously controlling the accuracy of content and credibility of sources. The news quotes the firsthand experiences of multiple disaster victims and official data, with clear information sources, demonstrating high journalistic ethical standards. Its writing style is primarily objective narration, mainly developed through text, supplemented by audiovisual elements such as images and videos, which not only attract readers’ attention but also powerfully complement the textual content. For example, the embedded video interviews several wildfire survivors, enhancing the emotional tension of the story by presenting their faces and voices. Case studies and personal narratives function as effective storytelling tools, showcasing the resilience and hope of residents after the disaster, highlighting the courage and community cohesion people demonstrate in the face of catastrophe (Johanna, 2022).
A noteworthy aspect of this report is that it centers on practical information for post-disaster reconstruction, adding links such as “Help for Wildfire Victims” and “Advice on Post-Disaster Insurance Claims.” These links not only provide readers with further background information, helping them understand the report more comprehensively, but also serve as tools to enhance news transparency, strengthening public trust in news organizations (Bradshaw, 2023). The entire news constructs a “solution-oriented narrative” guided by public interest, fully demonstrating the media’s ability to assist the public in obtaining practical benefits from news through information screening and verification. Additionally, the news’ structure is clear, with distinct subheadings and paragraphs, allowing readers to easily follow the information flow, enhancing the reading experience (Kulkarni, 2022).
Screenshot from ABC News “LA Wildfires Aftermath – Insurance, Housing, and Rebuilding” showing inserted links providing insurance advice for victims
In contrast, VICE’s “Wildfire: Surreal Photos of Los Angeles in Ashes“ evokes audience empathy through visual impact and personalized narrative. This report centers on 12 visually striking photographs, narrated through photographer Jamie Lee Taete’s first-person perspective (such as “I’ve been to the area so many times, but at one point it became hard to tell where I was because everything I knew was not there any more or on fire.”). The news doesn’t cite any government data or expert interpretations, instead focusing on atmosphere creation, extensively using poetic language like “Hell-on-Earth” to enhance emotional impact, making subjective emotional conveyance transcend pure information delivery.
Although this is a report about a disaster scene, both the text and image layout reflect an artistic quality. While these images lack explanatory captions like those in ABC News, they still possess high visual authenticity as they were taken on-site by a photojournalist. This approach, though not conforming to traditional news reporting standards, provides space for viewers to interpret for themselves in this somewhat fragmented report, precisely embodying VICE’s consistently aesthetic style.
Online Delivery Analysis
Both ABC News and VICE provide basic reader engagement tools, including author attribution, cross-platform sharing buttons, and related news recommendation links. Although both cover mainstream social platforms (such as Facebook and X), the differentiated design of their sharing functions reflects targeted adaptation to audience usage habits. ABC News has added Email forwarding and Copy Link buttons to its sharing panel. Meanwhile, VICE employs an aggregated sharing menu that allows one-click jumps to other platforms, reducing readers’ multi-platform distribution costs. According to SimilarWeb data, both websites actually have a relatively high level of social traffic on Reddit, indicating that VICE’s sharing design effectively matches its users’ content habits.
ABC News’s sharing design
The interactivity of social media has disrupted the traditional one-way news dissemination model, enabling bidirectional communication between journalists and audiences, becoming a defining characteristic of modern news communication (Gulyás, 2016). VICE effectively leverages this feature by placing social media buttons at the top of its reporting pages, allowing readers to access its YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok accounts with a single click. This design not only enhances user engagement but may also encourage readers to follow VICE’s social media platforms, potentially converting them into long-term fans. Additionally, VICE has carefully crafted differentiated content for various platforms—Instagram features short videos to quickly capture attention, while YouTube offers in-depth documentaries, enabling readers to choose content forms and viewing methods according to their personal preferences.
VICE’s sharing design
Technical Delivery
Testing shows that both ABC News and VICE websites perform well in terms of functionality, with video playback, article sharing, and page navigation functions operating stably across different devices (desktop/mobile) and browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox). Both sites default to opening page links in new tabs, effectively preventing reading interruptions and enhancing overall browsing fluidity.
ABC News demonstrates stable technical performance with fast page loading, clear navigation structure, and reasonable text layout conducive to extended reading sessions. However, the automatic playback of the first video on its homepage may cause unnecessary distraction for some readers.
VICE’s page design offers greater visual impact, featuring full-screen images of high quality and an overall more attractive style. However, since the content heavily relies on images, loading may be slow in poor network conditions, affecting the browsing experience. Furthermore, the pages contain a relatively high number of advertisements, which can interfere with normal reading. Notably, VICE has added a multilingual switching function, a design that effectively covers user groups with different language backgrounds, significantly improving product accessibility.
The landing page/interface displayed after sharing a VICE article on X
Additionally, when readers use VICE’s X sharing feature, the system automatically helps edit portions of the shared text, further simplifying the sharing process.
Conclusion
Although ABC News and VICE both fulfill the core function of news—”delivering information”—they use different technological means, narrative approaches, and interactive designs to meet the needs of various users in different contexts. In today’s environment where information is both fragmented and complex, this diversification of news formats likely represents the future direction of the digital news ecosystem.
References:
- (2022). Online journalism and storytelling: A training kit [Technical report]. Fojo Media Institute.
- Bradshaw, P. (2023). Writing for the web. In P. Bradshaw, The online journalism handbook: Skills to survive and thrive in the digital age (3rd ed., pp. 76–105). Routledge.
- Kulkarni, S., Thomas, R., Komorowski, M., & Lewis, J. (2022). Innovating online journalism: New ways of storytelling. Journalism Practice, 17(9), 1845–1863. https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2021.2020675.
- Gulyás, Á. (2016). Hybridity, convergence, changing relationship with the audience, and fragmentation. In S. A. Eldridge II & B. Franklin (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Digital Journalism Studies (pp. 396–406). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315713793
- https://pro.similarweb.com/#/digitalsuite/websiteanalysis/overview/website-performance/*/999/3m?webSource=Total&key=abcnews.go.com
- https://pro.similarweb.com/#/digitalsuite/websiteanalysis/overview/website-performance/*/999/3m?webSource=Total&key=vice.com
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