Vice News, the current events platform targeting millennials that sought to be “The Economist “For Young People” A decade spent by hundreds of journalists producing daily online news and video is now being brought to life by company founder Shane Smith, as a first outlet for the social platform for his podcasts and news reports and as a brand partnership tool – starting with a collaboration with Adobe announced today.
Smith’s media company, which he built from Montreal’s DIY punk magazine into a global juggernaut over 20 years, expanded into hard news in 2014 with the launch of the Disturbing News brand. Vice News offered a mix of daily written news, feature articles and engaging videos designed in the unique brand style of umbrella journalism—hipster staff reporters who entered news events with a camera, sometimes narrating the action in the first person. It quickly found an online audience, coming amid the success of the half-hour news series Deputy on HBO, which wowed a growing audience, after that Real Time with Bill Maher He took viewers on trips to North Korea with Dennis Rodman.
A rep for the company said Vice News 2.0 will not look much like its initial run Hollywood Reporter this week. The days of huge budgets and integration with ISIS are over. Vice, along with several emerging news brands in the 2000s — BuzzFeed News and Mic among them — took a nosedive in the following decade or, in some cases, earlier. Smith’s great success in legitimizing his media empire, which at its peak included 34 bureaus worldwide and numerous foreign language publications, has seen him file for bankruptcy in 2023, as the “media bloodbath” he long predicted for him and his team comes to fruition.
But Smith, who developed a reputation for wild partying as much as for worming his way into the company’s deep pockets as a savvy media executive, kept the brand’s YouTube page in the bargain sale of the company’s assets to private equity. He launched his own podcast and video series, Shane Smith has questionson the platform in 2024. The show, produced by Vice and its friend Maher’s Club Random Studios, deals with current events and misinformation.
The show is also a connecting thread to the brand’s soft relaunch on Wednesday, which will introduce a new but pared-down Vice News site. In addition to hosting Smith’s video podcast series, the second edition of Vice News will feature a mix of hosted video news segments and the company’s revenue driver: brand partnerships. The former has already started a YouTube channel with a series titled Deputy inside This brings some of the reporters who have been known since the 2014 launch back to their old stomping grounds and discuss what happened in the regions and stories they started covering 12 years ago.
The latter is Smith’s focus at the moment, as he’s in Morocco, fulfilling the end of a Vice-brokered partnership with Adobe by shooting with an independent team at Africa Lion. For its latest deal, VIce will engage the software brand’s PDF spaces in Acrobat to bring audiences within the African continent; These are huge annual military exercises. Using Adobe’s new PDF tool, the news brand will give readers the ability to view primary documents and other supporting materials alongside its reporting on next-generation defense technologies and the future of global security.
“Now more than ever, audiences need transparent, fact-based, nonpartisan journalism. As we build VICE News for a new generation, we’re proud to partner with Adobe Acrobat and take our audience beyond the story.”
As a consistent and prolific dealmaker, this collaboration will likely be one of many on Smith’s new Vice News. According to a press release about the Adobe partnership, Vice News will return as “home to a diverse group of voices and viewpoints” that includes both veteran journalists and the next generation of digitally native storytellers. And while no new hires have been hired or appear to be joining Smith imminently, the brand could easily tap into the media world’s wide pool of independent talent and partner with hosts and reporters already online.
This model is evident in the recent cooperation with Channel 5 and All gas without brake Andrew Callaghan. Smith worked with the YouTube personality while reporting from Greenland while US troops were deployed in the country. Smith was also part of the official US visit to Venezuela amid the arrest of Nicolas Maduro.
But don’t expect to start seeing a daily dose of interesting stories from around the world on the web coming from Vice News. The content will come when stories emerge that the largely shrunken operation sees fit and has the ability to cover.
“I think we want to go out and report things that maybe other people don’t or don’t do. And we continue that kind of model,” said Emily Spence, vice president of communications. THR this week. “We’re exploring the brand. There’s going to be a consistent rhythm to the podcast, but it’s going to kind of depend on where there’s a really interesting narrative that we can do… We’ll go where the story takes us.”
