Vice's Shane Smith: 'Young people are angry and leaving TV in droves'
The multimedia empire's chief executive on video journalism, North Korea – and why he won't be taken over by a big rival
- The Guardian, "Dialogue always works. That's what news is. And we're going to show you what's going on." (Lest he be labelled a bleeding-heart liberal, Smith later makes clear that "the only thing worse than the Republicans is the fucking Democrats".)
Bear-faced cheek …
Vice’s Shane Smith says ‘we don’t do branded content, we do content
sponsored by brands’. Photograph: Tim Knox for the Guardian
Shane Smith stayed up late getting drunk with one of his
presenters, and now he is exhausted, hungover and behind schedule.
Bottles of spirits stand, taunting him, from a table in the opposite
corner of an office at Vice Media's headquarters in Brooklyn's voguish Williamsburg neighbourhood, while he slumps in a brown leather armchair.
The bearish 44-year-old chief executive seems about as pleased to have an interview in the diary as a boy faced with a plate of broccoli. "I go to bed late and I get up early," he mumbles into his beard. But after an orange juice he soldiers on, sleepily repeating his proud sales pitch for the company estimated to have made him some $400m.
Founded 20 years ago by Smith and two friends in Montreal as a scrappy youth magazine, Vice has since mutated into a buccaneering multimedia empire spanning an eclectic website, a TV show, a film production house, an advertising agency and a record label. While other media firms rooted in print continue to struggle, it is forecast to make $125m in profit on half-billion dollar revenues this year.
This week it launches its latest online venture, Vice News, a more focused outlet for the kind of video journalism that has recently earned Smith and his team at the much-lampooned "hipster bible" some grudging respect as the unlikely champions of proper, on-the-ground foreign reporting and gritty US domestic stories. The online channel's first offerings are rough around the edges – someone forgot to add subtitles to a video package from Sochi – and Smith admits "we are not the greatest at launching things". Still, he promises that "two months in", all glitches will have been eliminated, and Vice will have changed the media weather again.
Long and short foreign video dispatches from its international, multi-ethnic gang of young reporter-hosts will sit alongside what Smith calls an "innovative, unique and beautiful" way of broadcasting breaking news. The action at global flash-points, such as Kiev last month, will be live-streamed from a correspondent's iPhone camera, if that's what works, and one even plans to defy mocking depictions of Vice people as real-life Nathan Barleys by filming war zones via his Google Glass.
"Our audience is forcing us to do it," says Smith, who claims to have more than 100 million monthly users across the Vice network as prime-time US cable news shows slide to ratings in the tens of thousands. "Young people, who are the majority of our audience, are angry, disenfranchised, and they don't like or trust mainstream media outlets. They're leaving TV in droves, but music and news are the two things that generation Y in every country are excited about and interested in."
Vice News will make no attempt to be comprehensive, Smith says, arguing that slavishly scrambling to "keep up with the Joneses" is what has badly blighted the big media. "The problem with the news cycle today and the news media in general is that it's kindergarten [kids] playing soccer. The ball goes over here, everyone goes over here. The ball goes over there, everyone goes over there."
The eccentric, gonzo-ish path that Vice has chosen to pursue instead has itself come in for sharp criticism from detractors among those he belittles as football-chasers. David Carr, the New York Times's influential media critic, memorably assailed its style as "putting on a safari hat and looking at some poop", while Dan Rather, one of US broadcasting's elder statesmen, recently dismissed Vice as "more Jackass than journalism".
The object of Rather's ire was the final episode of Vice's first television series for HBO last year, in which a crew gained access to North Korea and its basketball-mad boy-king, Kim Jong-Un, by shipping over the former Chicago Bull Dennis Rodman and several Harlem Globetrotters for a surreal exhibition match in front of Kim and thousands of spectators in Pyongyang. Coming shortly after the regime's successful third nuclear weapons test, Rodman's public declaration that he was Kim's "friend for life", and the young premier's ability to parade his western visitors on state media, angered critics who argued that the country's ghastly poverty and brutal human rights violations were inadequately reflected.
Smith, who is banned from North Korea after making two critical films on the regime, claims not to care because it secured them a second series. "Anyone can say whatever they want," he says, before belying his affected indifference by grouchily spitting out several of the 74 "fucks" and 27 "shits" that pepper our 70-minute conversation.
"I think we learned in the cold war that the 'commies-eat-babies', fucking, 'we're not gonna talk to them' propaganda rhetoric bullshit and 'we're just gonna point fucking tonnes of fucking missiles' – it doesn't fucking work," he says. "Dialogue always works. That's what news is. And we're going to show you what's going on." (Lest he be labelled a bleeding-heart liberal, Smith later makes clear that "the only thing worse than the Republicans is the fucking Democrats".)
"Every other news agency in the world would have fucking loved to have that footage," he says, rousing from his slumber and jabbing an index finger. "You look down your nose at me, yet the BBC, that venerable old institution, hid behind schoolchildren two months later," he adds, referring to the Panorama report made undercover on an LSE student trip. "I didn't endanger anybody."
Those who criticise Smith's ventures into advertising – such as Gawker Media's Nick Denton, who claims Smith is mainly interested in Vice's lucrative sponsored content streams – receive similarly short shrift. "Nick Denton has accused me of fucking Hiroshima," he says. "Gawker is a bunch of bitches … they have a bone in their ass about Vice."
He insists "we don't do branded content, we do content sponsored by brands", and defends Vice's production, for instance, of a web show on outdoor pursuits sponsored by The North Face. "Does North Face tell us where to go? Do they pick our hosts? Do they fucking pick the story? No. We're gonna make that fucking story. Do we wear some North Face shit? Sometimes." No programming has ever been edited for a sponsor, he says.
And he is unafraid to poke the flagship broadcast outlet of his newest business partner, Rupert Murdoch, who last August bought a 5% stake in Vice for $70m. "I love Fox News because they're so bad," he says. "I'm the opposite of Fox News, and so as long as Fox News is there, I'm happy, because I've got something I can throw a stick at." Unmoved by the channel's "Fair and Balanced" slogan, Smith adds: "I don't even think it's news. It's op-ed."
Pocketing Murdoch's old media shilling and organising Vice's output into more formalised channels – it announced plans to launch a "food vertical for global youth" last month, and five more channels are coming this year – might prompt suggestions that the perennial enfants terribles are becoming old-fashioned, just as BuzzFeed and other innovative whippersnappers are threatening to eat their lunch. Yet Smith has repeatedly batted away potential takeovers that would certainly have done for Vice's outsider status, he discloses. He says big media companies look at Vice and "they're like, 'fuck – we don't have any of this shit, and you guys are the whole next level. We'll just fucking buy you'. And we keep saying 'no, no, no'".
Despite his vast personal fortune – which remains tied to the firm's equity and will all go to "a trust fund for my kids" – Smith remains far too hungry for that. "I think I'll probably do this, because I'm weird, until we really are sort of the next MTV or CNN," he says, insisting that he takes literally this mantra that he has repeated for years.
And by steadily building a little magazine into what he unabashedly calls the "Time Warner of the street" he maintains that he, and the hundreds of skinny-jeaned acolytes tapping away at iMacs here and in Vice offices in 33 other countries, now know instinctively what their audience wants, while major media corporations focus group themselves to death trying to work it out.
"Young people have been marketed to since they were babies, they develop this incredibly sophisticated bullshit detector, and the only way to circumvent the bullshit detector is to not bullshit," he says. "We have developed this weird, Willy Wonka fucking content factory. And that's the only way we knew how to do it."
Curriculum vitaeThe bearish 44-year-old chief executive seems about as pleased to have an interview in the diary as a boy faced with a plate of broccoli. "I go to bed late and I get up early," he mumbles into his beard. But after an orange juice he soldiers on, sleepily repeating his proud sales pitch for the company estimated to have made him some $400m.
Founded 20 years ago by Smith and two friends in Montreal as a scrappy youth magazine, Vice has since mutated into a buccaneering multimedia empire spanning an eclectic website, a TV show, a film production house, an advertising agency and a record label. While other media firms rooted in print continue to struggle, it is forecast to make $125m in profit on half-billion dollar revenues this year.
This week it launches its latest online venture, Vice News, a more focused outlet for the kind of video journalism that has recently earned Smith and his team at the much-lampooned "hipster bible" some grudging respect as the unlikely champions of proper, on-the-ground foreign reporting and gritty US domestic stories. The online channel's first offerings are rough around the edges – someone forgot to add subtitles to a video package from Sochi – and Smith admits "we are not the greatest at launching things". Still, he promises that "two months in", all glitches will have been eliminated, and Vice will have changed the media weather again.
Long and short foreign video dispatches from its international, multi-ethnic gang of young reporter-hosts will sit alongside what Smith calls an "innovative, unique and beautiful" way of broadcasting breaking news. The action at global flash-points, such as Kiev last month, will be live-streamed from a correspondent's iPhone camera, if that's what works, and one even plans to defy mocking depictions of Vice people as real-life Nathan Barleys by filming war zones via his Google Glass.
"Our audience is forcing us to do it," says Smith, who claims to have more than 100 million monthly users across the Vice network as prime-time US cable news shows slide to ratings in the tens of thousands. "Young people, who are the majority of our audience, are angry, disenfranchised, and they don't like or trust mainstream media outlets. They're leaving TV in droves, but music and news are the two things that generation Y in every country are excited about and interested in."
Vice News will make no attempt to be comprehensive, Smith says, arguing that slavishly scrambling to "keep up with the Joneses" is what has badly blighted the big media. "The problem with the news cycle today and the news media in general is that it's kindergarten [kids] playing soccer. The ball goes over here, everyone goes over here. The ball goes over there, everyone goes over there."
The eccentric, gonzo-ish path that Vice has chosen to pursue instead has itself come in for sharp criticism from detractors among those he belittles as football-chasers. David Carr, the New York Times's influential media critic, memorably assailed its style as "putting on a safari hat and looking at some poop", while Dan Rather, one of US broadcasting's elder statesmen, recently dismissed Vice as "more Jackass than journalism".
The object of Rather's ire was the final episode of Vice's first television series for HBO last year, in which a crew gained access to North Korea and its basketball-mad boy-king, Kim Jong-Un, by shipping over the former Chicago Bull Dennis Rodman and several Harlem Globetrotters for a surreal exhibition match in front of Kim and thousands of spectators in Pyongyang. Coming shortly after the regime's successful third nuclear weapons test, Rodman's public declaration that he was Kim's "friend for life", and the young premier's ability to parade his western visitors on state media, angered critics who argued that the country's ghastly poverty and brutal human rights violations were inadequately reflected.
Smith, who is banned from North Korea after making two critical films on the regime, claims not to care because it secured them a second series. "Anyone can say whatever they want," he says, before belying his affected indifference by grouchily spitting out several of the 74 "fucks" and 27 "shits" that pepper our 70-minute conversation.
"I think we learned in the cold war that the 'commies-eat-babies', fucking, 'we're not gonna talk to them' propaganda rhetoric bullshit and 'we're just gonna point fucking tonnes of fucking missiles' – it doesn't fucking work," he says. "Dialogue always works. That's what news is. And we're going to show you what's going on." (Lest he be labelled a bleeding-heart liberal, Smith later makes clear that "the only thing worse than the Republicans is the fucking Democrats".)
"Every other news agency in the world would have fucking loved to have that footage," he says, rousing from his slumber and jabbing an index finger. "You look down your nose at me, yet the BBC, that venerable old institution, hid behind schoolchildren two months later," he adds, referring to the Panorama report made undercover on an LSE student trip. "I didn't endanger anybody."
Those who criticise Smith's ventures into advertising – such as Gawker Media's Nick Denton, who claims Smith is mainly interested in Vice's lucrative sponsored content streams – receive similarly short shrift. "Nick Denton has accused me of fucking Hiroshima," he says. "Gawker is a bunch of bitches … they have a bone in their ass about Vice."
He insists "we don't do branded content, we do content sponsored by brands", and defends Vice's production, for instance, of a web show on outdoor pursuits sponsored by The North Face. "Does North Face tell us where to go? Do they pick our hosts? Do they fucking pick the story? No. We're gonna make that fucking story. Do we wear some North Face shit? Sometimes." No programming has ever been edited for a sponsor, he says.
And he is unafraid to poke the flagship broadcast outlet of his newest business partner, Rupert Murdoch, who last August bought a 5% stake in Vice for $70m. "I love Fox News because they're so bad," he says. "I'm the opposite of Fox News, and so as long as Fox News is there, I'm happy, because I've got something I can throw a stick at." Unmoved by the channel's "Fair and Balanced" slogan, Smith adds: "I don't even think it's news. It's op-ed."
Pocketing Murdoch's old media shilling and organising Vice's output into more formalised channels – it announced plans to launch a "food vertical for global youth" last month, and five more channels are coming this year – might prompt suggestions that the perennial enfants terribles are becoming old-fashioned, just as BuzzFeed and other innovative whippersnappers are threatening to eat their lunch. Yet Smith has repeatedly batted away potential takeovers that would certainly have done for Vice's outsider status, he discloses. He says big media companies look at Vice and "they're like, 'fuck – we don't have any of this shit, and you guys are the whole next level. We'll just fucking buy you'. And we keep saying 'no, no, no'".
Despite his vast personal fortune – which remains tied to the firm's equity and will all go to "a trust fund for my kids" – Smith remains far too hungry for that. "I think I'll probably do this, because I'm weird, until we really are sort of the next MTV or CNN," he says, insisting that he takes literally this mantra that he has repeated for years.
And by steadily building a little magazine into what he unabashedly calls the "Time Warner of the street" he maintains that he, and the hundreds of skinny-jeaned acolytes tapping away at iMacs here and in Vice offices in 33 other countries, now know instinctively what their audience wants, while major media corporations focus group themselves to death trying to work it out.
"Young people have been marketed to since they were babies, they develop this incredibly sophisticated bullshit detector, and the only way to circumvent the bullshit detector is to not bullshit," he says. "We have developed this weird, Willy Wonka fucking content factory. And that's the only way we knew how to do it."
Age 44
Education Lisgar Collegiate Institute and Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada), BA, English Literature and Political Science
Career 1994 co-founder, Vice
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