Bullet dodgers
terrifying. We do what we have to do to get the stories.’’
When you reinvent yourself, of course, some of your old audience is left behind. Not everyone has applauded VICE’s slow, bumpy journey from the margins toward the mainstream, with some old fans lamenting the disappearance of the more anarchic spirit of old.
Others have heaped on the praise. In a recent New Yorker piece, VICE was celebrated for abandoning its previous ‘‘adolescent, male, proudly boorish, aggressively hedonistic’’ tone to become a far more compelling proposition: ‘‘For anyone accustomed to the current offerings on cable news – with its 24-hour cycles and blowdried personalities rehashing wire reports – it’s hard not to be impressed by VICE’s vitality and by some of the topics that it covers firsthand.’’
Alvi is delighted that VICE is becoming more widely recognised as an ‘‘alternative news source’’ with a high degree of credibility.
‘‘As the mainstream media focus on fewer and fewer stories, it leaves the rest of the world for us to talk about. Really, there’s a whole universe of under-reported stories out there, and we want to take that on. Just as other media organisations were shuttering their regional news bureaus, we were opening new ones in New Zealand, Australia, Japan and Eastern Europe. We’re genuinely global now. We’re not cultural imperialists who want to push American content down the throats of people in New Zealand. We also run your content over here. Our New Zealand office has been producing magazine content for the past decade.’’
It’s a pretty active office, too. Earlier this week, the VICE site was running locally written stories on rape culture in Wellington schools, the effect of race on pay equity here, the new Lorde record, American Trump-dodgers seeking New Zealand citizenship. There was a eulogy to a demolished K Road strip club, and an Auckland sewerage study that revealed high meth use.
‘‘We’re currently gearing up to get a lot more local video production from down there, too,’’ says Alvi. ‘‘That’s our end game. If there are compelling stories coming out of New Zealand and we have people who can tell them well, we want to use that content here in the States.’’