Vice’s cunning, irreverent journalism is dead – and executives with bloated pay cheques helped kill it
On Friday it was announced that the media company Vice would lay off hundreds of workers and halt publishing. It’s an ignominious end for an organisation that once promised to transform the way we consume media, and will have devastating consequences for young talent hoping to break into a shrinking industry.
I joined Vice in 2015. I was 26. I had newly quit a soul-destroying corporate job. I had no experience, no contacts and no journalism qualifications. I coldpitched editors at Vice incessantly, and eventually one gave me a three-month paid internship. When my internship ended, my boss – a woman of luminous, shining goodness, so much so that I’d paint her into the Sistine Chapel if someone gave me a ladder and a brush – got me a job as a staff writer.
Originally founded as a punk magazine in Montreal in 1994, Vice became a global media brand during the 2000s. It was known for its gonzo journalism and its puerile, often misogynistic, humour. Vice journalists did karaoke in North Korea and embedded themselves with Islamic State in Syria. But they also interviewed men who had sex with donkeys, and vomited on camera during interviews because they were so hungover.
When I arrived, the company was at a crossroads. Old Vice – a place where some colleagues turned up to work visibly high, where drug use was routine and people had sex in edit suites, where everyone dressed like 14-yearold skaters and I was once shown a three-second gif of a colleague’s flaccid penis slumping out of a sex toy – was on its way out. New Vice was incoming. Disney had just invested $400m, against a $4.5bn valuation.
Founder Shane Smith travelled the world opening new offices and distributing Vice-branded rings to favoured flunkies – sorry, senior executives – all the while giving vainglorious interviews in which he recounted having sex with women in bathrooms while on cocaine. There were brand partnerships – I remember one major deal that was briefly imperilled after we published an article called Why Farts Sometimes Get Trapped In Your Vagina – and there was a colossal amount of money being made, although not for the low-paid editorial and production employees.
During the four years I spent at Vice I did work I’m proud of, including launching a national anti-stalking campaign. My colleagues were racially diverse, gender non-conforming,
queer and from working-class and non-London backgrounds. What united them all is that they were clever, informal, funny and cunning. Vice gave a start to people who would otherwise never have got into the media. Pick up a newspaper or turn on the TV today and you will see ex-Vice staffers everywhere: they are Orwell- and Emmy-winning journalists, novelists, critics, TV personalities and hosts.
When I told people I worked at Vice, I’d usually get a sneering response – “You think you’re so cool, don’t you?” – but the reality was my co-workers were phenomenally decent people who were good at their jobs. I wish I could say the same for the executives. They were bloviating fools with bloated pay cheques. In the early days, Smith ran Vice like a medieval court, distributing senior roles to people known internally as “Friends of Shane”, with predictable consequences. After the Disney investment there was a cull, but the socalled adults who’d been hired to prepare us for a rumoured IPO seemed just as incompetent as the people they replaced. (Introducing herself to the office, one such executive memorably sent an all-company email in Comic Sans.)
The decisions some of these executives made were so baffling I sometimes wondered whether Vice was a giant confidence trick. They made redundant an award-winning team of global affairs reporters, then later decided they actually did want to do international news, and made culture writers rebrand as foreign policy experts. They spent hundreds of thousands of pounds launching and rebranding websites they closed down months later. They pivoted us to video, away from video, then back to video. Someone had the genius idea to launch a TV channel, because what millennials really wanted to do was stay in every night watching terrestrial TV. In a postmortem podcast uploaded on Friday by soon-to-be-laid-off Vice staffers to a Vice YouTube channel – their bosses had blocked access to Vice.com, but forgotten about YouTube – journalists pointed the finger at “the fucking babies in charge” and their catastrophic, everchanging non-strategies. The video has since been taken down.
It’s true that Vice was buffeted by stiff economic headwinds. In 2018, Facebook announced it would change its algorithm to deprioritise publishers’ content, effectively tanking the traffic of all digital media brands overnight. Vice had to endure decreasing advertising revenues, coronavirus and inflation. It lasted longer than its newmedia competitors – BuzzFeed, The Debrief, The Awl and the Hairpin – but ultimately its model of free-to-view, expensive-to-produce content wasn’t sustainable.
All of this would stick a lot less in the craw if executives had treated employees with respect, instead of enriching themselves as the company foundered. In 2023, about the time Vice filed for bankruptcy, senior executives were reportedly paid six-figure bonuses. While Vice writers are now laid off en masse, some of them while on maternity leave, Smith is the proud owner of a $23m mansion with a temperature-controlled wine rack, which he bought in 2015.
This makes me angry and despair about the future of our industry. It has been reported that at least 8,000 journalism jobs were lost in the UK and North America in 2023 alone. Every one of the digital publications I wrote for as an aspiring writer have now shut. Next week I’m giving a lecture to a group of journalism students, and I don’t know what to tell them, or if it’s even ethical to advise anyone to go into this industry any more.
Vice gave so many people a voice, including myself, and for that I will always be grateful. I am very sorry for all the voices we will never get to hear now it has gone.
Sirin Kale is a features writer for the Guardian