Gonzo tactics &

VICE co-founder Suroosh Alvi has come a long way: from unemployed junkie to global media mogul, writes

Grant Smithies.

Picture, if you will, a thoughtful young man, overflowing with ideas but low on job opportunities. Born in Toronto to Pakistani parents, he has intelligence and talent galore, but also a raging heroin habit that sees him bouncing in and out of rehab.

At his lowest ebb, this man comes to the realisation that he wants to write, covering the underground street culture he knows so well.

And so, in the mid 90s, fresh out of a drug treatment centre and living on welfare, Suroosh Alvi starts his own magazine with two friends – a scrappy little counter-culture rag called The Voice of Montreal.

Two decades later, that humble mag has blossomed into a massive youth media empire comprising websites, TV and documentary production houses, book publishing, a fashion and film division, record labels.

‘‘All that we did, really, was fill a vacuum’’ says Alvi, now 47, from his New York office. ‘‘When I looked out at the landscape of what was being published, there weren’t many compelling options, yet there was all this fascinating stuff happening that wasn’t being covered.’’

VICE Media now operates in 34 countries. Alvi’s team hosts two news shows on HBO in the States, and recently bought venerable United Kingdom-style magazine i-D. Over the past year, they expanded into our local market, with their own dedicated Viceland channel on Sky.

Alternative media success stories come no grander. VICE is now a sufficiently big deal that mainstream media corporations A&E, Disney and Hearst wanted a piece of the action, reportedly spending US$450 million to buy a 20 per cent share.

This former punk mag scribbler now heads up an organisation worth more than $US4 billion. That’s a higher book value than Buzzfeed and the New York Times combined, and Alvi is as amazed as anyone. Right from the beginning, it was a risky venture with a high chance of failure.

‘‘Really, it made no sense to launch

an English-language magazine in a French-speaking city in a shrinking media market with so much intense competition. But we saw a void, and we wanted to fill it with more exciting and authentic content.’’

Twenty two years later, that mission remains unchanged. Alvi’s still trying to make ‘‘great, gritty, raw’’ content and get it in front of as many people as possible.

‘‘That’s why we’re so excited about the launch of Viceland down there, because it’s another new audience. People might say ‘why start a cable TV channel in New Zealand, now that millenials have stopped watching TV?’ But we believe in the power of great storytelling, and whether people want to watch us on mobile phones, laptops, TVs or the big screen, it’s all the same to us.’’

The main reason VICE has become so huge, reckons Alvi, is that the mainstream media spent so long being complacent and dull.

‘‘At some point, the mainstream media made the assumption that young people didn’t care about news. Wrong! They just didn’t want boring news! So we just started filming each other, telling stories we thought needed to be told. It was rough around the edges, but ultimately, we were speaking our audience’s language in a way most traditional media sources weren’t.’’

It’s easy to see why Alvi’s operation has been a hit with the lucrative 18-34 demographic. In the online VICE magazine and across assorted Viceland TV shows, hard news rubs shoulders with all manner of divertingly lurid fluff.

Violence, prostitution, race, sexuality, drugs, terrorism, religion, porn – a succession of hot button topics are approached from unexpected angles, some deadly serious, others jaw-droppingly flippant.

Amble through the VICE archives and you’ll find stories entitled Students Who Whore, Hijab Vs Short Shorts and Donkey Sex: The Most Bizarre Tradition.

Unlucky with the ladies? The VICE Guide to Picking Up Chicks could be for you.

A throwaway piece in which a psychologist analyses the arguments couples have in Ikea sits beside a poignant investigative story on hidden HIV infection in majority Muslim countries.

Travel pieces eschew the usual palm-studded beaches in favour of meatier fare: a profile on Iraq’s only heavy metal band, exposes on diamond smuggling in Sierra Leone and underground gun markets in Pakistan, a consumer test of

VICE co-founder, Suroosh Alvi, has his own ‘‘junkie makes good’’ back-story.

Alvi says, ‘‘I try to avoid going into active combat zones.’’

Filming an episode of the VICE series Terror in Pakistan.