Shane Smith Wanted to Kick CNN in the Teeth

Shane Smith launched VICE News in early 2014 with the kind of energy that comes from genuinely believing the old media infrastructure had calcified past repair. The pitch was simple: use the correspondent network VICE had spent years building—people actually embedded in places cable news flew over on the way to the next press conference—to do ground-level reporting. Syria. North Korea. The US from the inside out. No anchor desk, no swelling graphics package, no advertiser feelings to manage.

For a while it worked. VICE News was doing things nobody else was doing with production values nobody else would accept—shaky, present-tense, sometimes genuinely dangerous. The aesthetic looked like a stylistic choice but was partly just what it costs to actually be somewhere. The reports from Pakistani gun markets. The ISIS coverage. Footage that made other news organizations look like they were broadcasting from a green screen in New Jersey.

Part of the original vision included a Berlin newsroom feeding stories about Germany into the global operation and vice versa—the idea that an international audience wanted one channel that collapsed geography. In theory, correct. In practice, harder than it sounds, because journalism doesn’t scale the way a content company needs it to.

VICE Media filed for bankruptcy in 2023. Smith had long since stepped back. The news operation got sold, restructured, picked apart. What remained was a much smaller thing than what was promised in January 2014, when the pitch was still fresh and the dream of kicking CNN in the teeth still felt like it might actually work.

He wasn’t wrong about CNN, though.