The Vice squad: Eddy Moretti, Shane Smith, and Suroosh Alvi. *
Photo: Chris Buck * Ryan Duffy has a loaded pistol 6 inches from his gut. He's standing in a bland office in Bogota, Colombia, reporting a story on the country's premier tailor of bulletproof clothing — Miguel Caballero, aka "the armored Armani." It's time to test the duds. Duffy has been mugging for the camera, flipping up the collar of the bulletproof jacket, grinning while Caballero tells him to inhale in preparation for the impact. But, as Caballero aims the gun, Duffy gets nervous. His smirk dissolves and his eyes close as Caballero begins to count. "Uno. Dos — " Bam! Duffy staggers backward, stunned. Then he lets loose a raspy laugh, lifts his plaid shirt to show his unblemished abdomen, and scoops up the flattened bullet as a souvenir.
This news brief has been brought to you by VBS.tv, a new Web-based channel created by the scruffy misanthropes behind Vice magazine, the hipster bible that has defined urban lifestyle for the past decade. Founded in Montreal in 1994 by a recovering heroin addict and two welfare cheats, Vice has since evolved into a caustic cocktail of provocation, hedonism, and arrogance. (Sample headlines: "The Vice Guide to Shagging Muslims," "Latino Is the New Black," and "A Guy Who Was on Acid for a Whole Year.") Today, the Vice empire includes the free glossy — with editions in 17 countries and a circulation of nearly 900,000 — a record label, a book-publishing branch, and Virtue, a marketing arm that helps brands like Adidas and Colt 45 tap into Vice's effortless ability to kick it with the cool kids. And now, the company is elbowing its way into the crowded young industry of Internet television, joining major broadcast and cable networks, Hollywood production companies, and homegrown sites like Heavy.com and Revision3. They're all looking for the same thing: an audience for original online video. To do this, the editors are using the jaundiced worldview of their street-culture rag to inform their coverage of global events — actual news.
VBS stage-dives into its coverage, dispatching amateur reporters — armed with little more than a camera, designer sunglasses, and a pair of steel cubes — to travel to the places that more-seasoned correspondents wouldn't be caught dead in for fear of... well, being caught dead. Like the streets of Baghdad, way outside the Green Zone. Or a black-market arms bazaar in Pakistan. Or the toxic remains of Chernobyl. Most of the VBS staff has no experience in journalism or television production, which may explain the absence of network news staples: no makeup, no artificial lighting, no handheld microphones, and — most crucially — no bones about being totally biased. "Traditional journalism always aspires to objectivity, and since day one with the magazine we never believed in that," says Suroosh Alvi, a Vice cofounder. "Our ethos is subjectivity with real substantiation. I don't think you see that on CNN." (Their tagline: "Rescuing you from television's deathlike grip.")
To gear up for the VBS launch this past March, Vice doubled the size of its New York staff and offices. It hired Monica Hampton, line producer of Fahrenheit 9/11, to serve as production manager. And it built seven editing suites, where eager young staffers hammer away on Final Cut Pro throughout the night. The site streams 10 to 15 minutes of new original content every day — a smattering of talk shows, music footage, and from-the-field news reports, uploaded in a series of slick-looking, one- to eight-minute installments. By late summer, viewers could navigate 150 hours of free programming. "The people there are on a mission," says Tom Freston, a creator of MTV and former head of Viacom. "They're inventing new things every day. It reminds me of MTV in the extremely early days."
And just as MTV was for cable, VBS aims to be a trailblazer for a nascent medium. It's not there yet. VBS launched without fanfare; by summer, according to comScore Media Metrix, it was pulling in a promising 351,000 unique visitors a month, putting it in the same league as Current TV but still far behind Heavy.com, which brings in 16 times that — 5.7 million unique visits a month. (The VBS honchos, not known for modesty, say they expect to hit 5 million monthly unique visits by the end of the year.) Still, the enterprise has gotten plenty of attention. Heavy Metal in Baghdad, a film derived from a VBS series, screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. And VBS boasts big-name groupies more accustomed to having fans of their own. "VBS is punk rock for the 21st century," says Bono (yes, Bono). "They are better-looking and more rock-and-roll than we will ever be."
Vice's loud, fast, and dirty sensibility seems perfect for Internet video, and VBS offers plenty of that kind of content — lascivious interviews with naked models, profiles of skateboarding stars, and music videos by indie rockers.
But the site also hosts a compelling cache of serious offerings: a short documentary series on the civil war in Darfur; a sympathetic Hurricane Katrina follow-up on the status of victims; an exposé of Manila's largest garbage dump; and a 15-part investigation of the environmental wreckage caused by oil-sands refineries in Alberta. The Vice editors want to use their Web TV site to prove that they aspire to more than the pursuit of cheap laughs and cute girls. "We've grown up," says Alvi. "We're not just for 24-year-old skateboarders." (Alvi and Smith, shrewd marketeers both, initially worried that Vice's history would overshadow VBS's earnest efforts, so they ditched the Vice name for the more oblique VBS, an abbreviation that Alvi says is open-ended, but is generally understood by fans to stand for Vice Broadcasting System.)
Not that anyone would — or should — mistake VBS for 60 Minutes. "News doesn't have to be told by some guy behind a desk," says Adaptation and Being John Malkovich director Spike Jonze, who serves as the site's creative director (and hosts his own VBS series of interviews with au courant artists like Kanye West and M.I.A.). "This is about how events are affecting us."
So. The brand whose only association with the word substance usually includes the word illicit is demanding to be taken seriously. The same cocky jerks who once gleefully skewered the unfortunate, the uncool, the unguarded, are now using their irreverent acumen for the greater good instead of just for prurient entertainment. Or so they say. But can you trust the guys who once rated the world's races by how attractive they are to do a five-episode installment on Darfur and mean it? Or is this just a high-falutin' version of Jackass?
Vice is nice: VBS.tv tackles diverse subjects like (from top) locals at a Manila dump site, alt-rock goddess Cat Power, and Iraq's lone heavy metal band.The apostle Paul found redemption on the road to Damascus. Ivan Ilyich found it on his deathbed. Shane Smith found his after a fashion party. Smith, a Vice cofounder, is sitting in his cluttered office at VBS headquarters, located, not surprisingly, in the trucker-hat and ironic-mustache mecca of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He has a baby face, a bear's body, and a jagged tattoo swirling up his leg. The 25 staffers flitting around the offices all adhere to a similar haute-hobo chic: mossy beards, skinny jeans, and thrift store T-shirts. (Smith, for his part, is dressed like an overgrown prep schooler, in an Izod shirt and seersucker shorts, which somehow comes off as punk-rock.) As Smith, who is about to head out on a reporting trip to North Korea, describes his Big Moment, he never raises his voice or his eyebrows, never sits forward in his chair. He has the unflappable confidence of a natural huckster.
"We started doing Vice and we got into fashion and music and lifestyle and all that crap," he says, running a hand through his slicked-back rust-colored hair. "Suddenly, you're at a Chanel party and you're with some model, with coke running down your nostrils, and you kind of get lost in the vortex. But as we expanded internationally, we started to see a lot more of what was happening in the world. I started to get really pissed off about politics and economic disparity and the environment. I said, There's all this shit going on, and we aren't doing anything about it — although we have the ability to do so.'"
Warning: This is exactly the kind of narrative — from decadent cynicism to postmillennial earnestness — that journalists look for when they write profiles, and as such, it's easy to be suspicious of Smith's tale. After all, Vice was built on lies: In 1994, Smith and Gavin McInnes faked their way onto the Canadian welfare rolls to launch their magazine, which was funded through a federal welfare-to-work program. (Alvi, who had just dropped out of grad school and then kicked a nasty heroin habit, was a legitimate welfare recipient.) They repeatedly lied to the press — telling them that they were being sued by the Village Voice, staging a made-up meeting with MTV, dropping the names of prospective investors they'd never actually met — and each time they saw their fortunes or reputation skyrocket. (One of the purported investors, a dotcom media baron named Richard Szalwinski, read an interview in which he was mentioned, contacted them, and ended up investing $1 million in their company and relocating them from Montreal to New York City. Or so the Vice guys say. Szalwinski doesn't remember reading the article before giving them money. Oh, and the actual amount? More like a few hundred thousand, he says.) They also published fake interviews with car thieves and hooligans who set homeless people on fire, and later ran a gag announcement that they had discovered Osama bin Laden in China's Pamir Mountains.
But as Vice matured (slightly) it struggled with its image of hilarious nihilism. Under the public face of McInnes, whose "Dos and Don'ts" column distributed brutal fashion advice to unwitting victims (including toddlers and homeless people), Vice celebrated hard drugs, angry sex, and class warfare. But over the years it has been hard to tell when the editors were joking — and exactly who they were laughing at. There was the time that McInnes defended the Gen Y gentrification of Williamsburg to the New York Press by tossing out the N-word and concluding, "at least they're white." McInnes has also proclaimed the inferiority of non-Western cultures, opined that most women secretly want to be dominated, and boasted of spreading ultraconservative ideology to his readers. When asked, McInnes usually maintained that he was challenging American political correctness, but some of Vice's fans began wondering whether "irony" was giving way to shock-jock-style bullying. Vice "stands for stupidity, consumption, sexual exploitation, and fashion as worldview," groused one critic in an online forum. Even the magazine's writers expressed doubt: After being snubbed for an interview by a riot-grrrl band that objected to Vice's vicious content, one contributor wrote in the magazine's own pages, "I wasn't sure how much I wanted to stand behind them ... I hate me."
Smith and Alvi were growing similarly dissatisfied, and McInnes' role at Vice and VBS has since been greatly diminished. "Gavin liked to push buttons, and he got a lot of personal notoriety for dealing with race issues," says Smith. "This is not what we're about, it's never what we've been about, and it's not the way we want to go." (McInnes declined to be interviewed for this story.)
Meanwhile, Vice editor Jesse Pearson has been publishing an increasing number of legitimate journalistic scoops. Over the past year, Vice has approached topics with the kind of sincerity that McInnes would have railed against: profiles of North Korean refugees, a special issue on poverty in Appalachia, and another issue written entirely by Iraqis. (Not that Vice has abandoned its mordant tone altogether. Witness the beginning of a recent review of Wilco's Sky Blue Sky: "Hey, everyone who likes this band: Fuck you.")
Vice may have cornered the market on cool in print, but online the competition is stiff. And getting stiffer: For one thing, rival coolios and pranksters abound online. For another, Internet video is fighting for attention, legitimacy, and profit — and it has yet to prove itself as a true competitor to television by actually making much money. During the past year, everyone from Kevin Rose to Warner Bros. has gotten into Web video, and venture capitalists have poured millions into the likes of Heavy.com and Funny or Die. Yet few have figured out a way to make serious cash. "We're in the investment phase in the market," says Michael Wolf, an analyst at ABI Research, a market research company. "Not a ton of people are making a ton of money right now, but they see the bucket of gold at the end of the rainbow." (ABI estimates that Web-video sites will earn $240 million in ad revenue in 2007 — not a lot when you consider how many companies are competing for those dollars.) That explains why so many Web-TV ventures are folding: HBO's This Just In site was shuttered earlier this year, and Bud.TV is struggling.
But not, apparently, VBS, whose execs claim it's already profitable; Smith says he expects to net $1 million this year. (Believe him at your own risk.) Part of that will come from advertising. In addition to the standard pre-reel and banner ads — for $15 to $45 per thousand impressions, which is at the high end of the industry — VBS gives advertisers the opportunity to purchase "posters" that lurk unobtrusively behind their videos, or sponsorships of entire series. (For an additional fee, Vice's marketing company will create the spots.) But so far, the majority of its revenue comes from licensing. MTV Latin America aired a series of half-hour programs, derived from online VBS content, this summer. IFC Canada, the independent-film network, is ponying up production costs for a VBS series on filmmaking. (IFC Canada will air the series, but VBS will retain the rights to sell the material in the US and internationally, and to stream it online.)
And they've received a major boost from MTV; neither VBS nor the network will go into much detail about the terms of the deal, but MTV executive vice president for program enterprises Jeff Yapp says that the two "have a formal relationship" and that the network helped come up with the concept for VBS. Smith downplays the connection — "I don't even talk to them," he says — but it's hard not to see a spiritual link. After all, MTV killed the radio star; if the VBS guys can live up to their outsized dreams, they might threaten MTV — not that that says a whole lot these days.
In his office, Smith recounts a conversation he had with Tom Freston, the MTV cocreator. Naturally, in the retelling, it was the guy with the slicked-back hair — not the veteran executive — who was dispensing the advice. "I said to him, You built the biggest media platform for youth in the world, and what did you push through it?'" Smith says. "My Super Sweet 16? Laguna Beach? We don't want to be guilty of the same thing. You can have poo-poo, ca-ca, bum-bums, and tits, but you've also got to have other things."
"It's all about caring," interjects Eddy Moretti, VBS executive producer. "It sounds stupid," he admits.
"Giving a shit," Smith corrects.
"Giving a shit," Moretti repeats quickly, with a nod. Smith is right: That sounds much cooler.
Senior editor Jason Tanz (jason_tanz@wired.com)* is the author of* Other People's Property: A Shadow History of Hip-Hop in White America.
