Vice was the biggest media story of the 2010s. Originally a skate magazine, at the peak of its powers, in 2017, Vice had a valuation of $5.7 billion – more than the New York Times. It was the 10th most valuable private company in America.
As the old publishing world collapsed in the wake of internet disruption, its founders convinced the old guard of newspaper and TV magnates – the likes of Rupert Murdoch, WPP and Disney bought substantial shareholdings – that they had a bead on the emerging online landscape. And, crucially, that they had the full attention of the already hard-to-reach millennial generation.
Its founders were a pair of itinerant hipsters. Shane Smith – the frontman – had been selling US currency on the black market in Budapest in 1994, when his co-founder, Suroosh Alvi, recovering from heroin addiction, asked him to come back to Montreal, to help out on a tiny skate magazine he had taken over. Third co-founder Gavin McInnes, now a right-wing commentator, also came on board as an assistant editor, and Vice re-launched, with a website, two years later.
Twenty years later, they employed 1,000 people at its Williamsburg, New York headquarters: the largest single employer in the district.
Alvi and Smith seemed like the future because of their casually sleazy model of journalism. They sought to outrage, titillate, disrupt. They made documentaries about Bolivian donkey sex initiation rites. About trepanation – drilling a hole in the skull as a sort of well-being hack. They sent their intern off to do stand-up comedy high on LSD. And mixed the lighter stuff with crude but brave news pieces – reports from the frontlines of Syria, of Donetsk and Liberia that were first-person, intimate slices of life beyond the plummy objectivity of a Kate Adie figure.
The typical reportage was a host watching Afghan regulars high on heroin shoot their rifles into the air mid-fire fight with the Taliban, whispering into his microphone: “Woah, this is nuts.”
A decade later, though, and Vice is broke. In 2023, after four years of listing at the waterline, its assets were finally flogged off in a fire sale. That $5.7 billion collapsed into $1.5 billion.
Along the way, they made a lot of dreams come true – a whole generation of presenters, producers and journalists were minted into the media and told to reach for the moon. But the fast and loose cynicism of its senior executives could only be sustained by breaking lots of things along the way. They were notoriously noxious employers.
Smith used to boast of the “22/22/22”… that they would hire 22-year-olds, work them 22 hours a day and pay them only $22,000 a year. For those who took the bargain, implicitly there was meant to be a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that would one day make up for the privations. Many were given share options to keep them on the treadmill. Now worthless.
I myself had to win a County Court judgment against Vice UK. And this wasn’t even in the bankruptcy era – it was just an average day in 2019, when I’d been working for them for 11 years. They would employ new hires at fantastic rates, and kept others on subsistence wages, even as the paper profits stacked. To suck in the big media giants, they juiced their traffic statistics beyond any reasonable level of cynicism.
Many felt bruised by their encounters, even those ostensibly winning. That’s certainly the flavor that comes across from Eddie Huang’s new documentary: Vice Is Broke, that debuted on Mubi in late August.
Huang has been stiffed a sum of $250,000 in unpaid royalties: now, he is on the trail of his money, and by way of that, to tell the story of the rise and fall of what was once billed as “The Millennial CNN” (yes, millennials were the future once).
“One day there will be an Alex Gibney documentary that tells the Vice story,” Huang posits. “In the same way as Enron, or WeWork… But this isn’t that film.”
From 2012 onwards, his Huang’s World cookery show gave him a platform as a heavily-tattooed Anthony Bourdain, meeting the world and eating it. He was a great brand fit: a likable, gruff, ballsy, card-carrying hipster at the peak of the hipster era. Huang recalls doing the show as the best gig he ever had: true creative freedom. But then, as he describes, the corporate goons moved in. Back in 2008, Vice’s London office was a wood-walled hutch on Leonard Street, home to four editorial staff. By 2010, it had moved to a glass-walled former ice cream factory – massive.
Inside, every financial quarter, an ever-swelling team would be treated to a crisp video montage of recent expansions: the huge deals they were doing, the innovative films, the top artists they were working with. Walking away from those briefings was narcotic: the sense was of everything growing in every dimension all the time.
But “cool is a one-time resource,” as legendary early editor Jesse Pearson tells Huang. “You can sell it once. Then you’re done.”
And by the end of 2014, Vice was on the cusp of cashing out its cool. It had probably done about 80 per cent of all the great work it ever would.
Vice’s problems arrived a couple years after the big investments. It’s a story as old as time; suddenly, that high valuation implies high profitability; that means traffic targets; that means brand-incompatible advertisers must be seduced. Now, what began as an honest dialogue with your audience becomes metricized to within an inch of its life – and the targets quickly become impossible.
To meet them, Vice needed women: the other 50 per cent of the millennial demographic, who were less keen on the cackling gross-out libertarianism that McInnes had pioneered. So Smith pivoted towards the new style of progressivism bubbling through US campuses. The new vibe was about personal essays, and the “problematization” of ordinary things. Thrift shop Judith Butlers multiplied. Counter-cultural witticisms became crowd-pleasing eye-rolls. Smith, who last year returned to a re-launched Vice as editor-in-chief, told the Ankler podcast in 2024: “F— big platforms, f— big advertisers. They killed us in the long run.”
Yet despite this progressive veneer, editors were tasked by the company with maintaining relations with right-wing influencers like Milo Yiannopoulos. In one of the most revealing segments of the film, Huang speaks to a former section editor, Mitchell Sunderland, who was part of an email group “devoted to mocking social justice stories”, according to BuzzFeed, and who was a senior staff writer at Broadly, Vice’s women’s channel.
As BuzzFeed reported at the time: “‘Please mock this fat feminist,’ Sunderland wrote to Yiannopoulos in May 2016, along with a link to an article by the New York Times columnist Lindy West, who frequently writes about fat acceptance.” When the story broke, rather than “fess up”, Vice simply fired Sunderland. Around this time, as Vice is Broke points out, Smith even said he was looking to buy the BBC with Elon Musk.
As Huang highlights in his film, one day this story will be a comedy-drama feature film in the style of The Wolf of Wall Street – perhaps with Jonah Hill as Smith – plus an Alex Gibney docu-drama, plus umpteen books. It will be a cliché: a part of the cultural furniture of the 2010s as much as Biba and Oz were for the 1960s. After all, Vice began as a joke that got out of hand, and then became a kind of psychic prison for those who’d once been in on it.
Gavin Haynes is a London-based freelance journalist
