Late in February, in the Ryugyong Chung Ju-yung Indoor Stadium, in Pyongyang, North Korea, ten thousand stiff-looking spectators in gray Mao suits gathered to watch a basketball game. Vice Media, the Brooklyn-based company, had arranged to have members of the Harlem Globetrotters—Anthony (Buckets) Blakes, Will (Bull) Bullard, and Alex (Moose) Weekes—play with North Korea’s national team. The company’s cameramen were in the crowd, filming for a weekly news-magazine series, “Vice,” that will air this spring on HBO. Not long before the game started, the crowd, which included the state’s diplomatic and military élite, began to chant “Manse!”—the traditional invocation that means “Ten thousand years, so long live Korea!” The otherworldly roar announced the entrance of North Korea’s Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un, who succeeded his father in 2011. He sat on a dais, where he was joined by his wife, the former singer Ri Sol-ju, and, a few moments later, an unlikely guest of honor: the onetime Chicago Bulls star and cross-dresser Dennis Rodman. Although almost all foreign media is blacked out in North Korea, basketball is a popular sport, and the country’s ruling family are N.B.A. fanatics.
Rodman has a reputation for wild sartorial choices—pink hair, a wedding gown—but he was dressed with relative restraint. He wore a tuxedo jacket, black track pants, wraparound sunglasses, a black sequinned scarf, a black hat that said “USA,” and various lip and nose rings. At each dunk by a Globetrotter or three-pointer by a member of the North Korean team, the crowd erupted in screams. The game ended, as a basketball game cannot, in a tie, 110–110.
Afterward, Rodman, with one hand in his pocket, delivered a speech. “First of all,” he said, his words echoing in the immense stadium, “I would like to say thank you. It’s been very good to be here. You guys have been very, very kind to me and to my compadres from America.” He paused as his North Korean translator struggled with “compadres.” Rodman continued, “I’m sorry that my country and your country are not on good terms, but for me and—the country . . .” Seeming to lose his train of thought, Rodman turned and bowed in the direction of the Supreme Leader, who had been watching him with a slightly nervous expression. With a flourish of his fingers, Rodman said, “Sir, you have a friend for life.”
This cheerful scene—billed as “basketball diplomacy”—was soon complicated by developments in U.S.-North Korean relations. After Rodman’s visit, North Korea, which had recently been hit with tighter U.N. sanctions, scrapped its 1953 armistice with South Korea and threatened a preëmptive nuclear attack on the United States. Last week, Kim said, “The time has come to settle accounts with the U.S. imperialists.”
What had seemed like a bold P.R. stunt by Vice now looked like cozying up to a dangerous dictator. This was not helped by a report from Ryan Duffy, a Vice correspondent, on Kim Jong-un’s hospitality: “Dinner was an epic feast. Felt like about ten courses in total. I’d say the winners were the smoked turkey and sushi, though we had the Pyongyang cold noodles earlier in the trip and that’s been the runaway favorite so far.” Rodman, speaking to reporters in Pyongyang, professed his admiration for the Supreme Leader: “Guess what! I love him.” He added, “The guy’s really awesome.”
“I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” a flabbergasted Dan Rather said, on CNN. U.S. News & World Report called the episode “More ‘Jackass’ Than Journalism,” and pointed out that, in light of the regime’s abuses and recent reports of cannibalism among a starving population, “those remarks and current headline on the Vice Web site that ‘North Korea has a friend in Dennis Rodman and Vice’ seem a bit, well, tasteless.”
Vice has never been celebrated for good taste. The company started in Montreal, in the mid-nineties, as a free magazine with a reputation for provocation. Once, after its editors were accused of sexism for featuring nude porn stars in the magazine, they posed nude as well. Current articles combine investigative reporting with a sensibility that is adolescent, male, and proudly boorish. Vice’s most recent issue, the Cultural Atrocities Issue, reads like a combination of National Geographic, High Times, and Penthouse Forum. It includes a photo shoot, titled “Home Entertainment,” of topless women posing with remote controls over their breasts, and a travel piece about the remote Kalash Valleys of Pakistan: “It’s not a nice place to live, but, as I discovered, it is a great place to party.”
In recent years, Vice has been engaged in an energetic process of growing up—both commercially and in terms of journalistic ambition. It now has thirty-five offices in eighteen countries, from Poland to Brazil. It operates a record label, which, in 2002, began putting out albums by such of-the-moment bands as Bloc Party and the Raveonettes; book and film divisions (Vice recently helped market the R-rated “Spring Breakers,” directed by Harmony Korine); a suite of Web sites; and an in-house ad agency. These ventures are united by Vice’s ambition to become a kind of global MTV on steroids. According to Shane Smith, Vice’s C.E.O., “The over-all aim, the over-all goal is to be the largest network for young people in the world.”
Vice’s most significant move has been from print to video. On its YouTube channel, which has more than a million subscribers, the company has branched into more serious journalistic fare—a recent series was titled “In Saddam’s Shadow: Baghdad 10 Years After the Invasion”—though it still has features like “The Biggest Ass in Brazil” and “Donkey Sex: The Most Bizarre Tradition.”
Vice executives sometimes refer to their company as “the Time Warner of the streets,” and in the financial press there is occasional discussion about the price a potential sale might bring. A source familiar with the company’s finances estimates last year’s revenues at a hundred and seventy-five million dollars. In 2011, Vice was valued at two hundred million dollars, and last year Forbes speculated that the company might someday be worth as much as a billion dollars.
Not long after Rodman’s trip, I went to see Smith at the company’s headquarters, a set of converted warehouses in Williamsburg. Smith met me in the Bear Room, a conference room decorated with a Persian rug and a grizzly bear, now stuffed, that had been shot after surprising Vice producers filming in Alaska. Smith defended Vice and its reporters against charges of journalistic recklessness. Talking about Kim Jong-un, he said, “Look, the fact that he came is a big deal. The fact that we’re the only people to meet him is a big deal. The fact that we went to his house was a really big deal.” He went on, “Is it journalism? It depends on what the definition of journalism is.”
Smith is forty-two and bearish, with a salt-and-pepper beard: he looks like a younger Santa Claus after a tour of duty in Iraq and a stop at a tattoo parlor. The idea for the trip, he said, had come about during the making of a previous Vice documentary in Pyongyang, in 2010. Smith, on a propaganda tour, had seen the basketball, signed by Michael Jordan, that was given to Kim Jong-il by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, in 2000. He realized that sending an N.B.A. star would be the perfect way to get Vice’s cameras back into the closed state. “It was not set up as a stunt,” Smith told Adweek. “Look,” he said, “if I could pull off a stunt where the most hermetic leader of the most hermetic fucking country in the world works with me to do a stunt to promote my TV show, then every TV fucking company in the world should hire me to work for them.”
Smith is both Vice’s C.E.O. and its onscreen avatar—as if Jeff Zucker and Wolf Blitzer were one person. Apart from a few years spent bouncing around Eastern Europe, he has had no other career in the two decades since he helped to found Vice. Over the years, he has worked in ad sales and, increasingly, in a managerial and editorial role, which includes starring in the HBO show. He is both garrulous and profane—he often drops F-bombs into a sentence, along with a line from Wordsworth or Yeats. In one video, shot in Yemen, the filmmaker Spike Jonze, a friend of the founders, asks Smith to describe “the Shane Smith character.” Smith calls himself “the poor man’s Hemingway.” His summary of his life style: “Bon vivant, storyteller, drunk. Let’s have fourteen bottles of wine at dinner, roast suckling pig, and a story about chopping a dude’s head off in the desert.”
Vice’s show on HBO has the tagline “News from the edge.” Besides North Korea, “Vice” takes on subjects from political assassinations in the Philippines to India’s nuclear standoff with Pakistan. It showcases the company’s signature brand of gonzo journalism, which it calls “immersionism.” Vice sends its staff members—generally tattooed young reporters in skinny jeans with scruffy facial hair—into dangerous, far-flung places. At times, the aesthetic of the show is somewhat overblown: the editors, who, over the years, have demonstrated a penchant for opening segments with blaring rock music, never miss an opportunity to cut to raw imagery of carnage, including shots of a severed hand. Its correspondents participate in the stories they’re covering—in another North Korea story, a reporter joins refugees on an “underground railroad” as they make a nighttime border crossing. Vice staffers let the camera know when they’re bored or scared, and they deliver emotional speeches about what they’ve seen. A segment by Smith, in which he interviews child suicide bombers in Afghanistan, ends with a shot of Smith on the plane and a reflective voice-over: “As we took off, I looked at my iPhone and my computer. . . . And I found myself thinking, This is our twenty-first century? This is our modern age? Where children are used as transportation devices for dynamite.”
Long before Vice began its experiments with participatory journalism, Hunter S. Thompson—writing for Rolling Stone in the seventies—turned his stories into drug-addled first-person invective, mixing fact and fiction, and abandoning the pose of neutrality. It’s often noted that Thompson had a moral agenda: exposing the dark side of mainstream America’s culture and political system. Vice claims to have a similar objective. Introductions to the HBO series announce that it’s out to examine “the absurdity of the modern condition.”
Critics have accused Vice of sensationalism, arguing that its real purpose, in exploring slums and war zones, is to titillate and entertain its core audience—males between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four. But Fareed Zakaria, the Time columnist and CNN host, who serves as one of the show’s producers, told me that the show has “loosened the format” of television reporting. “What Vice is trying to do is to get a new audience interested in the world,” he said. Of Vice’s unusual stunts, he said, “Geoffrey Crowther, longtime editor of The Economist, had two internal rules: simplify, then exaggerate. A lot of very good journalism involves mechanisms to get you to pay attention.” As Smith put it to me, “We want you to love us or hate us. We just don’t want you to be indifferent.”
From the perspective of established media companies, Vice’s biggest novelty is not its unruly journalistic techniques but its ability to make money in the Internet age. That, along with its young audience, has made Vice an object of industry fascination. In recent years, a steady procession of executives in black town cars—from Hearst, Time Warner, Bertelsmann, News Corp., and Condé Nast—have been making the pilgrimage to Brooklyn to learn how, in Smith’s words, to “make content that young people actually give a shit about.” Rupert Murdoch, after his visit, tweeted, “Who’s heard of Vice Media? Wild, interesting effort to interest millennials who don’t read or watch established media. Global success.”
One day, I was at the Vice offices when a group of HBO executives came by for a meeting. They were not a stodgy group—they wore wire-rimmed glasses and sleek dress coats—but their arrival had the feel of a delegation from another country. They sat in a waiting area where a wall of flat-screen TVs played images from Vice-produced events: people dancing with L.E.D.-lit beach balls at the Coachella music festival, Snoop Dogg exhaling smoke from a blunt, Smith cavorting with African warlords. A few feet away, a receptionist sat at the front desk, wearing a nose ring and thick tribal earrings. Vice’s trendy young employees milled busily about.
Nina Rosenstein, a programming executive for shows including “Real Time with Bill Maher,” said, “The first time I came here was with Bill. We were, like, wow.”
Adam Dubov, who oversees HBO.com, said, “I’ve accused Eddy”—Vice’s chief creative officer, Eddy Moretti—“of hiring all these people as extras.”
Rosenstein went on, “What happens when these people turn thirty? Do they get fired?”
After a while, Vice’s executives arrived. Moretti, who is forty-one years old, wore a fedora and a Lenin beard. He has a graduate degree in cinema studies from N.Y.U. and is something like Vice’s house intellectual. He had a cell phone to his ear. He held it to one side and said to Rosenstein, “Harmony Korine wants to do a show with you.” Smith high-fived Rosenstein, who said, “Hi, handsome,” and the group walked into a screening room.
A young producer pulled up a file with clips for the HBO show, labelled “IRAQ-COCK-ASS.” “Iraq” referred to a segment about the aftermath of the Iraq war, in which Smith investigates whether the use of toxic weaponry caused birth defects in the local population. “Cock” meant “Cockblock”—a segment in which a scrawny Vice staffer named Thomas Morton attempts to navigate China’s dating scene.
“What is ‘Ass’?” Rosenstein asked.
“Assassination,” Smith said. It was the piece about political violence in the Philippines.
They watched a few segments. Smith had recorded the voice-over: “This week on ‘Vice,’ Ryan heads to the Philippines, where politicians are massacring each other. And I travel to Afghanistan, where the Taliban are adopting new and horrific terror tactics.” In the Philippines piece, Ryan Duffy rode in a convoy with a Filipino politician whose family had been killed in an assassination attempt on the same route, three years earlier. He asked the politician, “How nervous are you—just every day, travelling?” In the Afghanistan piece, everyone watched Smith become visibly emotional after interviews with would-be child suicide bombers. When it was over, the room grew quiet.
“Wow,” one of the HBO executives said. “Powerful. Hard-hitting.”
Next, they discussed supplementary material for HBO.com, which would include Bill Maher and others talking with Smith about how the segments were made. Rosenstein had a note about Smith’s videotaped introductions, which were shot in the Bear Room—a setting that she thought might not please Maher, an animal-rights advocate. “Better move the bear out of the shoot,” she said.
“Yeah,” Smith said. “We’ll move the bear.”
Smith and Moretti escorted the executives out the building’s back entrance, where a row of black Escalades idled on North Tenth Street.
If Vice’s show on HBO represents a cultural shift from the margins to the mainstream, its finances are already established. The investor Joe Ravitch, who is one of Vice’s board members, told me that he views “Vice” less as a source of income than as a “barker show,” an advertisement that will draw traffic to Vice’s online business. Smith said that the show would “build the profile of the brand.” “It’s a very easy thing to point to and say, ‘We do that,’ ” he said, but he added, “I think online is bigger numbers.”
Vice’s Internet presence is spread across a number of platforms: Web sites, including Vice.com; an ad network; and its YouTube channel, where it repurposes many of its videos. Vice makes more than eighty per cent of its revenue online, much of it through sponsored content, a growing area in online media. Besides selling banner displays and short ads that play before its videos, Vice offers its advertisers the option of funding an entire project in exchange for being listed as co-creator and having editorial input. Advertisers can pay for a single video, or, for a higher price—one to five million dollars for twelve episodes, according to Vice—they can pay for an entire series, on a topic that dovetails with the company’s image. (The North Face, the outdoors company, recently sponsored a series called “Far Out,” in which Vice staffers visit people living in “the most remote places on Earth.”)
At the highest end of the sponsorship spectrum are verticals, in which companies can sponsor entire Web sites. If you go to Vice’s main site, Vice.com, you’ll see the weird, ribald material that defines its brand (“New York Fashion Week . . . On Acid!,” “India’s Street Doctors Will Bleed the Sickness Right Out of You”). Tabs at the top connect to Web sites on single subjects: Motherboard, which focusses on technology; Fightland (ultimate fighting); and Noisey (music). The content on these sites is sponsored by companies such as Garnier, Toshiba, and Scion. Vice’s sponsored verticals tend to be in softer areas, like music and art. As Smith said, “Crest doesn’t want to be next to severed heads.”
Smith describes sponsored content as a return to the soap-opera model of early television: “It’s ‘As the World Turns,’ sponsored by Procter & Gamble. And you’re going to do that show anyway. And Procter & Gamble just sort of fits in.” But when I spoke to Spencer Baim, Vice’s chief strategic officer and the head of Virtue, its in-house advertising agency, he pointed out that mere sponsorship has become “a dirty word” among advertisers. “Being a sponsor is just slapping your logo on something and not being strategic about it,” he said. Instead, he added, sponsored content should represent something “fresh”—a true creative collaboration between Vice and its advertiser.
The result is that Vice’s sponsored material can feel like a strange beast, neither advertising nor regular content but something in between. The most ambitious of Vice’s verticals is called the Creators Project—a venture devoted to the intersection of art and technology which Vice created with the chipmaker Intel. The front page of the Creators Project Web site recently featured a vaguely academic blog post and video about a “new cinema hackathon”: a two-day event in which the nonprofit Eyebeam and the visual-effects company Framestore partnered with techies to create new forms of “interactive storytelling,” using Intel products. Intel is the sponsor not only of the blog post but of the event, the video documenting it, and the Creators Project Web site. For the past three years, the company has paid Vice “tens of millions of dollars” annually, according to Deborah Conrad, Intel’s chief marketing officer, to fund and publicize similar projects.
The same hackathon video is also playing on YouTube, where, as of last week, it had been viewed close to ten thousand times. If that number seems low, it’s because, in the nebulous world of “content marketing,” the goal is not strictly to attract viewers. It’s to change the perception of the company—to make it seem cooler, or, in Intel’s case, Conrad told me, like an “experience brand,” something closer to Apple or Disney. She said that one of Intel’s goals was to generate publicity—and by this metric the fact that I was calling her meant that the project was already succeeding. “We wanted to reach media people, like you, that weren’t familiar with us. We wanted to see Intel coverage in Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair.”
To some, it’s the way Vice works with brands, rather than its reporting style, that makes its journalism suspect. “If anything, Vice sold out years ago, when it began to build up an internal creative agency,” Nick Denton, the publisher of Gawker Media, wrote, in 2011. “Vice is no longer an editorial organization and hasn’t been for a while.” Smith is dismissive of the idea that its branded content compromises its editorial vision. He said, “Part of the reason Vice is successful is because we have cash to make stuff. Everyone else is just fucking wandering around trying to find budgets to make their dream project.” It costs money to investigate homeless populations in Bogotá’s sewer system, the war in Syria, and floating-garbage islands in the Pacific Ocean. At one point, he told me, “Anyone who is in the media game and says, ‘I don’t want to make money,’ is basically saying, ‘I don’t want to work.’ ’Cause money makes media.”
The way to make money online is through video, which commands higher advertising rates than written material does. It is also, increasingly, what young people consume: a recent poll found that teen-agers spend more time on YouTube than on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Vice hopes that, ultimately, online video will break off some of the profits of a much bigger business: the seventy-two-billion-dollar television-advertising market. In 2011, YouTube began paying Vice and other companies to create shows that it hopes will challenge traditional television. Vice’s more than thirty online shows—including “Fresh Off the Boat,” an extreme food show, and “Fringes,” which examines subcultures “from criminals to cults”—have so far garnered more than three hundred million YouTube views. This doesn’t make Vice one of YouTube’s giants (Machinima, a video-game network, gets about two billion monthly views), but it’s a start.
In 2011, Vice received fifty million dollars from the Raine Group, Ravitch’s investment firm; the former Viacom and MTV executive Tom Freston; and the advertising conglomerate WPP. Ravitch said that Vice represented an opportunity to bridge the gap between old and new media. “Old media is still very important, still huge,” he told me. While new-media companies such as Facebook attract attention more for their presumed future earnings than for their current profits, “the nice thing about Vice is that it’s the future and it’s already very profitable.”
Before it was the future, Vice was Voice of Montreal, a free magazine created in 1994 under the auspices of a welfare-to-work program, with the goal of covering Montreal’s cultural events. Its founders were Suroosh Alvi, the son of university professors from Pakistan and a recovering heroin addict, who was on welfare, and Gavin McInnes, a tree planter turned cartoonist, who had to get on welfare in order to be hired. Instead of covering street festivals, the two wrote about what interested them: drugs, rap music, and Montreal’s punk-rock scene. Voice of Montreal’s first issue carried an interview with the Sex Pistols singer John Lydon. Alvi, who is now forty-four, pointed out that he and McInnes wanted to pursue “authenticity.” “We were going to cruise around with drug dealers while they were doing their rounds,” he told me. “Instead of writing about a prostitute, we were going to get prostitutes to write for us.”
Their salaries were paid by welfare checks, but the magazine was financed through ad sales. McInnes introduced Alvi to Smith, a childhood friend from Ottawa, whom he’d given the nickname Bullshitter Shane. Smith, who had been going door-to-door for Greenpeace, had ambitions of becoming a novelist. But sales turned out to be a natural fit. “He could sell rattlesnake boots to a rattlesnake,” Alvi said, and added, paraphrasing Jay-Z, “He could sell water to a well.” “We’d go to these major record labels, and he’d convince the president to give us ads.”
In polite Montreal, McInnes wrote, in a 2012 memoir called “How to Piss in Public,” their “gonzo journalism stuck out like a thumb covered in shit.” But perhaps their greatest transgression was espousing an ambition that seemed suspiciously American. In Canada, Smith has said, “everyone’s a C-minus.” Within two years, they’d taken the magazine national, and infiltrated U.S. record stores, changing Voice to Vice, to avoid confusion both with their previous incarnation and with the Village Voice. According to McInnes, Smith had a habit of calling late at night from pay phones and shouting, “ ‘We are going to be rich,’ into the receiver again and again, like a financial pervert with O.C.D.”
Vice’s move to the U.S. began with a prank. Smith falsely told a Canadian newspaper that the magazine was being bought by the local dot-com millionaire Richard Szalwinski. According to Smith, the article caught Szalwinski’s eye, and he requested a meeting—where he offered to buy twenty-five per cent of the company, for just under a million dollars, and to finance a move to New York. (Szalwinski told Wired that he doesn’t remember reading the article, and that his investment was a few hundred thousand dollars.) Szalwinski envisaged a “multichannel brand” and built a state-of-the-art Web site, at Viceland.com. (At the time, “Vice.com” was owned by a pornographer.) In 1999, Vice moved into offices on West Twenty-seventh Street, in Manhattan, with pink couches and gold-plated espresso machines, and branched into retail, selling streetwear by labels like Stüssy in stores they opened in Manhattan—on Lafayette at Prince—and in Toronto, Montreal, and Los Angeles. “His plan was great,” Alvi said of Szalwinski, “but it was way, way too early.” In 2002, after the dot-com bubble burst, Szalwinski’s money evaporated. Vice owed money to landlords and to venders. From a valuation of just under four million dollars, Alvi recalled, they discovered that they were three million dollars in debt.
Vice moved to the offices of the clothing company Triple Five Soul, in Williamsburg, and attempted to regroup. Though at one time or another the founders had had a hand in every part of the business, a rough division of labor emerged: McInnes handled the magazine, while Smith and Alvi shared responsibility for everything else—the record label, the Web site, ad sales, business development, and Vice’s fledgling international expansion. Smith spent the year cutting deals with creditors. The dot-com experience, Alvi said, confirmed their faith in what they call “punk-rock capitalism”: the principle of paying in advance, instead of going into debt. They returned to a mantra of “One page of ads equals one page of content.” Within a year, Smith says, the company was profitable again.
A certain type of downtown denizen likes to talk about his first encounter with Vice. The magazine presented an aggressive hedonism—early covers featured lines of cocaine—combined with a love of everything taboo. Sample cover lines: “Retards and Hip Hop”; “Pregnant Lesbians”; “80s Coke Sluts.” Inside, the writing was inscrutable. “It was like it was written in another language,” Amy Kellner, the magazine’s former managing editor, who is now a photo editor at the Times, told me. Bylines were often made up. Articles tended to launch directly into rants. One reader said, “It was like a zine come to life.”
Short on staff, and unable to pay freelancers well, McInnes wrote much of the magazine, often using aliases like Christi Bradnox. In early issues, provocation is mixed with a sort of helpfulness, even good cheer. McInnes, who is often called “the Godfather of Hipsterdom,” flaunted the lumberjack look that is now associated with Williamsburg: flannel shirt, beard. He became known for articles that functioned like alternative self-help guides, including “The Vice Guide to Eating Pussy,” an earnest, if obscene, primer, and “The Vice Guide to Every Religion in the World.” McInnes told me, “My big thing was I want you to do stupid in a smart way and smart in a stupid way. So if you’re going to Palestine, try to find a good burger joint. Don’t talk about Israel and the borders, 1967, Gaza—just find a good burger joint. Conversely, if you’re gonna do a thing on farts or poo, talk to experts in digestion, find out the history of what we know about farts, why they smell. Be super-scientific and get all the data. Which is what we did with ‘The Vice Guide to Shit.’ ”
Lesley Arfin, who started as an intern at the company in 2001, said, “Gavin and Shane were best friends and huge partiers—really alpha males. Suroosh was a little more calm.” But tensions soon arose. Vice’s business ventures became more serious, while McInnes’s antics became increasingly extreme. In 2003, he told the Times, “I love being white and I think it’s something to be very proud of. I don’t want our culture diluted.” An ex-staffer said, “That was the beginning of the end.”
In 2007, McInnes left the company, in a split that resembled a band breakup, with the founders citing creative differences. I recently met with McInnes, who is now a contributor to “Red Eye,” on Fox News, and an owner of an advertising group called Rooster NY. We went to a burger place called Williamsburger. McInnes, who is forty-two years old and wore a red flannel shirt and an untrimmed beard, seemed slightly weary. He looked at the selection of craft beers and asked the waiter, “Do you have Budweiser in a bottle? Let’s do that.” McInnes describes his departure from the company as the triumph of advertising over independence: “Marketing and editorial being enemies had been the business plan.” The conflict increased as Smith pursued loftier advertisers, McInnes said. “The Do’s and Don’ts would have some guy’s dick hanging out.” Advertisers would flinch. “And then they would go to whatever less offensive competition we had. Like Complex or Mass Appeal, or one of the more rappy ones. And that was really frustrating for Shane, I think, cause he’d get them to the top of the mountain, and I’d moon them, and they’d jump off.”
In online comments, people sometimes mourn “the old Vice.” Adherents complain that its “sensibility has gotten less offensive, but a little more in-your-face.” An ex-staffer told me, “The last issue, they did all these pictures of a man weeping over his dead child. I never saw Vice as the appropriate forum for that. It made me cringe.”
Smith acknowledges McInnes’s contributions to the magazine, but when McInnes left, “we weren’t doing anything—we were a zine,” he says. “It was a magazine, and it was coo-coo caca and the bum-bums. And we said, ‘We’re gonna go this way,’ and he didn’t come with us. And now, if you want to look at ninety per cent of our profits and all the growth of the company, and why Time Warner’s talking to us, and why Google’s talking to us—why anybody’s talking to us—it’s because of online video.”
In 2006, the magazine put out a one-off DVD called “The Vice Guide to Travel,” funded by MTV, which is owned by Viacom. The project was initiated by a Viacom executive named Jeff Yapp, who was charged with developing ventures outside television. Vice staffers made trips to the slums of Rio, to Congo, and to Paraguay, where they tracked down descendants of a pre-Nazi German colony set up in the nineteenth century by followers of Richard Wagner. Spike Jonze helped edit the pieces. In one oddly spellbinding segment, Smith and a female employee from Vice’s German office take a train to Chernobyl. The camera follows as they get drunk on the train and then spend a few eerie hours staggering around the snowy abandoned site, shooting off machine guns at “mutant boars.”
The project “pretty much scared Viacom to death,” Yapp told me. He sought approval from Tom Freston, Viacom’s C.E.O. at the time. Freston, who was one of the founders of MTV, had lived in Afghanistan before he became a television executive. He took an immediate liking to Smith and to Moretti, who had joined Vice after writing an article about Manhattan’s marijuana delivery services. When I met with Freston for lunch at the Four Seasons Hotel, he said, “I fell in love with these guys.” He said he thought that Vice could be a network of the future, comparing the cable revolution to the one taking place on YouTube. “There are thousands of channels out there. How do you stand out from the pack? The big thing is by being there first. CNN, ESPN, MTV. They were all first in their categories.” Viacom agreed to partner with Vice on VBS.tv, an online video site. (Freston was fired from Viacom in 2006, and has since joined Vice as an investor, adviser, and board member; Vice bought out Viacom’s interest in 2010.)
One of the first videos that Vice produced for its online venture was “Heavy Metal in Baghdad”—a series of documentary pieces that were eventually turned into a feature film. In 2006, in the middle of the Iraq war, Alvi and Moretti flew to Baghdad to follow a group of Iraqi teen-agers who had formed a heavy-metal band called Acrassicauda. Amid exploding bombs, the Vice camera crews followed the band members as they visited the site of their demolished practice space, and mourned the way that their lives had unravelled during the war. “It sucks, dude,” one of the band members tells Alvi, displaying a surprising command of American slang. “We’re talking here about a free country. . . . Where’s the freedom?” The film ends in Syria, where the band members reunited as refugees. It premièred at the Toronto International Film Festival, in 2007, and received stellar reviews. The Times called it “an intrepid, unlikely and altogether splendid feat of D.I.Y. reportage.” Alvi told me that it also crystallized Vice’s brand of “journalism-news-entertainment.” He said, “Our video content, when done well, is one part each of those things.”
The videos that Vice produces every week are not always like “Heavy Metal in Baghdad”—or like “Vice” on HBO. With endless space to fill on YouTube, and flush budgets from sponsors, Vice’s content runs the gamut, from bland to fascinating. One day, after talking with Smith in the Bear Room, I sat in on a “content meeting,” in which the editors for each of Vice’s verticals went over new features. Smith, who had another meeting to attend, said that, in general, he prefers being “a brand artist” to handling day-to-day management. “I’m only really good at two things,” he said. “I’m good at content”—filming documentaries—“and deals.”
The meeting had the look of a film-school crit session: plaid shirts, week-old beards. Many of the staffers wore gold rings, resembling brass knuckles, that read “VICE.” There was no clear boss, and it was hard to determine how the content was judged. Smith likes to say that there are three criteria for a Vice story: “It has to be simple, it has to have a hook, and it has to have a punch in the face.” Ryan Duffy told me, “It’s the sniff test: Would I tell my buddy about it in a bar? Yes? Cool.”
Rocco Castoro, the thirty-one-year-old editor of Vice’s print magazine and of Vice.com, discussed its unusually sober issue devoted to the war in Syria, which featured graphic photographs of the carnage, and two first-person accounts from twenty-something reporters, who had embedded with the Free Syrian Army. Alex Pasternack, the editor of Motherboard, who had unkempt curly hair and chunky eyeglasses, discussed a story on drones, which he described as “a feel-good piece on unmanned flying aircrafts.” Andy Capper, a director, played a clip from “Noisey Jamaica,” a ten-part YouTube series on Jamaican dancehall music, which he described as “an unscripted Jamaican ‘Jersey Shore.’ ” Capper, who is British and has a scar on his face from being hit with a bottle in a bar fight, added that the idea for the show had come about while making the recent Snoop Dogg documentary and “spending time in Jamaica and meeting the artists and realizing there’s a lot of drugs and guns and fucking intense projects.”
The meeting was relentlessly positive. Ciel Hunter, who helps oversee the Creators Project, previewed a fashion line of eight high-tech dresses, made with the help of Intel’s technology, in which “every dress self-animates and comes to life,” and a video choreographed by Benjamin Millepied. “It’s like a very artsy, abstract dance movie.”
“Awesome!” a staffer said.
“You guys have some amazing shit,” another added.
To really experience Vice, you need to visit the company’s international offices. In the early two-thousands, hoping to expand the magazine’s readership, Smith spent years travelling around Europe and opening new offices, convinced that, as Eddie Huang, one of Vice’s online-video hosts, told me, “all of the weirdos probably want the same shit.” Now that many of Vice’s corporate sponsors are global conglomerates, the sprawl continues. Vice has grown in lockstep with the spread of hipster culture: what was once a Brooklyn-based trend has become the lingua franca of “global youth,” as Vice’s executives call it. Since Brooklyn is a brand, it is no longer necessary to live there. Smith, for example, lives in Tribeca.
In December, I joined Smith and other Vice executives in England to celebrate the tenth anniversary of their London office, which is based in an old dairy plant in the Shoreditch area—the approximate equivalent of Williamsburg. I arrived at the office early one evening to find it mostly empty. Andrew Creighton, Vice’s president, was there, wearing a long overcoat and Tom Ford slippers with naked women painted on them. He told me that, unlike MTV—which broadcasts a monolithic American vision of youth culture—Vice’s international editions aim to “localize” their sensibility and send articles and story ideas back to Williamsburg. A staffer named Bree Horn told me, “This week, we filmed a guy injecting himself with cobra venom. Insurance was a total nightmare. One of the snakes got out.” The video, “Getting High Injecting Snake Venom,” has received more than two million views on YouTube.
Before the anniversary party, I met the company’s executives—six bearded men—for dinner at Roast, a swanky restaurant in Southwark. Smith ordered a “gamekeeper’s terrine,” followed by an English roast, a seventy-four-dollar bottle of Malbec, a hundred-and-nine-dollar Châteauneuf-du-Pape, and a seventy-nine-dollar Chablis. (Smith: “We’ll try it all! We want the finest wines!”) The party was in the Old Vic Tunnels, an underground railway network that had been turned into night clubs. For a minute, I stood beneath a stage near Smith, watching the Detroit-based rapper Danny Brown chant, “I’m the black Brad Pitt!” Osama bin Laden’s niece, the socialite Wafah Dufour, elbowed past, in a leopard-print fur jacket. Claustrophobia soon set in: the event consisted of a series of underground concerts, packed with sweaty teen-agers. Smith seemed bored. “To be honest, I get a hell of lot more jazzed hanging out with Google engineers,” he said. The night ended at the Old Blue Last, a three-hundred-year-old Shoreditch pub that Vice now owns. I followed Smith and Vice’s other executives—Alvi, Moretti, and Baim—to a small back room lined with red vinyl banquettes. At its center were two large coffee tables, covered in what appeared to be cocaine residue, which the executives ignored. Smith slumped into a banquette and put his feet up as partygoers flowed in and out. He began taking swigs from a bottle of cheap rosé, musing about the pleasures of growing up: “Drugs, booze—everything is a construct to get laid!” One of the guests, a twenty-one-year-old Scottish kid, ogled him from afar. He told me that he was a Vice fan, and that he recognized Smith from YouTube: “I remember seeing the video of that gentleman over there in North Korea and thinking, What a cool job.”
Smith is often asked about Vice’s end game. If it sold to a larger company—a Facebook or a Google—it could more easily reach a larger audience. At one point, Moretti told me, “I just feel like we’re the greatest thing on the Internet that not a lot of people have seen yet.”
Smith insists that a sale is not going to happen. “Two years ago, the answer would be an unequivocal yes,” he told Adweek recently. Now, however, he says that Vice can achieve the same scale by selling its content piecemeal to other companies—to YouTube, through its original-content program, and to TV channels.
In part, this plan reflects the way that the thinking about online video has changed since Vice got into the business. YouTube’s presumed disruption of traditional television hasn’t happened as quickly as people thought it would. Still, as what Moretti called a “distribution monster,” YouTube is crucial to Vice’s ability to expand.
According to Smith, so is another unlikely area: news. In addition to beefing up its coverage of advertiser-friendly areas like sports and fashion, Vice plans to create a “twenty-four-hour global news channel,” by turning its foreign offices into news bureaus that will report, in real time, on events in their regions. Vice is opening bureaus as quickly as traditional-media organizations are closing them.
Smith told me, “It used to be, back in the day, that news was the most profitable of all shows that the networks did. The Gulf War built CNN. There’s a lot of conceptions that news doesn’t make money, that young people don’t care about news. But young people obviously care about news—that’s why we’re successful.” He went on, “I know it sounds crazy, but let’s say, hypothetically, you become the default source for news on YouTube. You get billions of video views, WPP monetizes it. Then you are the next CNN.”
This would be a different business model from the one Vice currently has. At present, Vice’s profits—which a source estimates were forty million dollars last year—seem to be dependent on securing and maintaining partnerships with a few major corporate clients. If you spend enough time inside the Vice empire, much of its noise and energy—the Web site and the ad network, the international offices, even Smith’s talk of global domination—can start to feel like a ruse, in the vein of its “basketball diplomacy” stunt, a show to make those partnerships happen.
If Vice does become a global news network, it might have to rethink some aspects of its prankster approach to reporting. Earlier this year, Vice became the center of another controversy, when it followed the story of John McAfee, a millionaire software mogul who had retreated to a compound in Belize with a retinue of “hired” girls and guard dogs. In November, McAfee fled after being summoned for questioning by police in Belize about the murder of his neighbor, a fifty-two-year-old American named Gregory Faull. Castoro, the editor of Vice, and Robert King, a contributor, joined McAfee on the lam. (He denied having anything to do with the murder.) Not long afterward, the correspondents released a blog post titled “We Are with John McAfee Right Now, Suckers.” It seemed as if Vice had once again embarrassed its stodgier competitors. But a photograph in the post was embedded with geo-data that revealed McAfee’s location: a hotel in Izabal, Guatemala. King claimed that the coördinates were false, but McAfee held a press conference and was arrested by the Guatemalan police. He turned against Vice, writing on his blog, “Obviously, legal proceedings are under way.” (Vice says that McAfee has not sued.) Media outlets that had been following McAfee’s and Vice’s exploits with some envy began to mock Vice instead. Forbes.com titled a post “Dear Journalists at Vice and Elsewhere, Here Are Some Simple Ways Not to Get Your Source Arrested.”
Still, if Vice is the future of media, it might be argued that, for all its faults, it’s no worse than what we already have. For anyone accustomed to the current offerings on cable news—with its twenty-four-hour cycles and blow-dried 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. While in London, I had planned to accompany Smith on a shoot for the HBO show: an interview with a drug kingpin in one of London’s tougher neighborhoods. But the night before the interview another opportunity came up, for an episode about global warming called “The World Is Sinking.” Environmental stories, though not as sexy as violence and danger, are nevertheless part of Vice’s purview. Smith told me, “I have two big convictions: one is environmentalism, and the other is that war is bad.”
Shortly after the anniversary party in London, Smith learned that the mayor of Venice had agreed to do an interview in the middle of the Piazza San Marco, which in recent years has been regularly inundated with up to two feet of water. At 5 A.M., I found myself at the airport, waiting to board a small commuter plane to Venice.
Smith was accompanied by Alex Detrick, Vice’s P.R. guy, and Will Fairman, a thirty-two-year-old cameraman, whose tousled hair and British accent made him resemble a grownup member of the band One Direction. Vice’s party had been in full swing when I left, just after dawn, less than twenty-four hours earlier. Despite sleeping for most of the previous day, I felt delirious with exhaustion. Smith told me that he had not yet slept. “I was in meetings all day,” he said, in an offhand way. “Then dinner. Then I fucked around until 2:30 A.M. I’ll be O.K. until about three, when we interview the mayor.”
Venice was overcast, clammy, and cold. We were met at the airport by the third member of Smith’s crew: Costanza Lombardi, an impossibly chic twenty-four-year-old employee of Vice’s Milan office, who wore black harem pants. She said that she’d discovered Vice via online documentaries. “I just fell in love with them,” she said. “They’re so ironic.” She added that both Vice magazine and the videos “give you a fresh breath” by communicating in slang. “It’s part of our language,” she said. “I talk with my friends in the exact same way. I don’t know how many times I say ‘fuck.’ ”
We took a water taxi through the canals, past crumbling buildings and water-stained walls, and arrived at San Marco just as the floodwaters were rising. The area was swarming with tourists, and a narrow pathway of raised wooden planks was threaded precariously through the square. As the water rose, the tourists crossed the square on the planks, shuffling in a long, two-person-wide line, like animals boarding Noah’s Ark.
“It’s fantastic,” Smith said, watching the tourists. He began to talk about global warming. “Humans won’t do anything unless we have a gun pointed to our heads. But I think this is it. I think we have a gun pointed to our heads. It’s like, ’K, chaps, it’s time to fucking fix it!”
Lombardi had bought Smith and his crew some plastic waders from a souvenir stand. He and his cameraman put them on and strode into the knee-deep water. Smith kept his hands in his pockets as Fairman filmed. I waded a few feet behind. The water was filthy, and occasionally a dead pigeon floated past. Someone was playing the piano in a café at the edge of the square, and its tinkling sounds filled the air. Smith began doing a little waltz in the water. He marvelled, “It’s all eerily surreal.”
About halfway into the square, Smith stopped. A few hundred yards away, he spotted the Bar Americano, which had a foot of water inside but appeared to be open for business. Smith had an idea. “You know what’ll make this a Vice story?” he called over his shoulder. “We’re going to walk into a bar and have a drink!” The idea had all the elements of a Vice feature—a collision of tragedy, hedonism, and world-shaping events. Smith mused, with evident pleasure, “The world is sinking, and we’re having a drink.”
He waded in the direction of the bar, and the cameraman followed. A tourist pointed and shouted, “CNN!” ♦
