Vice entered the nightly news business this week, delivering a rebel-style newscast on HBO with no anchor, no ads and none of the predictable tics and tricks of the broadcast old guard. The show is aimed at the very market segment that The New York Times is feverishly trying to reach — millennials.

Vice News Tonight still has that rumpled, pre-release feel to it, but one particular segment caught my attention: it was about what Vice called a prison strike across 12 states that is affecting 24,000 prisoners who refuse to eat or work.

This is one of those stories that has gained traction at digital-only sites like the Marshall Project and The Intercept but not much from mainstream news organizations. The Times ran one modest Associated Press story on October 4 but nothing else.

Several readers of The Times wonder why more hasn’t been done. Here’s one: “Over the past several weeks I have read news reports about a number of prison strikes happening in prisons across the country that began on the anniversary of the Attica uprising,” Richard Barber of Brooklyn wrote in an email to the public editor’s office. “In one Alabama prison there are reports of prison guards joining the strike themselves one weekend. Now the DoJ is investigating the Alabama prison. Doesn’t the Times have a responsibility to cover a national story like this?”