Vice Media made a big, dumb bet on staying cool
New media sites are like London buses. You wait ages for one to come along, and then two get cancelled at once. Last week I was writing about BuzzFeed News and how, even after changing so many of the default assumptions of modern journalism, the model they pioneered appears to be on the edge of ruin. This week it’s the turn of Vice Media, the America-Canadian lifestyle, culture and politics magazine-turned-website that will long be held up as a pillar of hipster culture. The New York Times reported last week that the company — once valued at $5.7bn after investments from Disney and Rupert Murdoch — was on the brink of bankruptcy. I’m not going to leave myself a hostage to fortune on the outcome of Vice’s current travails. The cultural penetration of the Vice name has been on the wane for several years, and the origins of the brand have been mired in controversy. Instead, I want to talk a little about what Vice is, was, and what the future for alt-media looks like. Vice was, in fact, pretty much the first publication that ever hired me to write for them (excepting the Oxford Times, where I had a column for my final year at university). They paid me real money when I was a 21-year-old know-nothing aspirant hack, and at a rate of something like 30p a word (I’ve not been offered many more lucrative freelance deals). The first piece I ever wrote for them was a love letter to London’s Trocadero, a rundown arcade in the West End which is now a boutique cinema and retail complex. It’s still one of my favourite pieces I’ve ever written. Over the next couple of years, I wrote an array of features for Vice, covering topics ranging from homelessness to Scientology, child geniuses to air pollution.
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