The Rebel Brand That Forgot What It Was Rebelling Against
There was a period when getting a VICE internship felt like arriving somewhere. The magazine Suroosh Alvi and Shane Smith built had something real in its prime: reporters who actually went to the places they wrote about, photography that didn’t flinch, writing that felt produced by people with genuine opinions about the world. I devoured every issue. The design, the attitude, the sense that somewhere someone was doing journalism without apologizing for what they found.
That’s mostly gone now. VICE is cutting roughly fifteen percent of its workforce—around 1,350 people—and collapsing its constellation of editorial verticals down to three to five properties. The Wall Street Journal broke the numbers: more than $100 million lost in 2017, half that again expected for 2018, and monthly traffic down from 36 million visitors two years ago to 27 million today. Publications like Waypoint, Amuse, and Tonic are apparently among the casualties.
Smith had already stepped down as CEO amid reports of systematic internal problems—sexism, bullying, creative dysfunction—handing the company to Nancy Dubuc, who arrived with Disney backing and a mandate to stabilize things. Stabilization has apparently meant deciding that several of VICE’s better properties aren’t worth keeping.
I’m not surprised, but I’m still annoyed. I watched it happen in slow motion over several years, the way you watch a friendship dissolve—too incremental to name a moment, too obvious in retrospect. VICE went from a genuine document of outsider perspectives to a scaled-up content operation chasing ad revenue and prestige television deals. The bite came out of it. The stories got safer. The writing got smoother in the wrong direction. Somewhere between the HBO deal and the Disney money, the magazine decided it wanted to be taken seriously by the exact institutions it had spent years making fun of.
There’s a familiar shape to this. MTV spent a decade becoming whatever it became, and nobody who loved the early version could pinpoint exactly when it stopped being that. VICE followed the same arc: took the money, took the corporate partners, lost the thing that made the money worth taking. Whether the layoffs represent the bottom of that arc or just another floor on the way down, I genuinely don’t know.
The journalists caught in this restructuring didn’t create the business model that’s now imploding around them. I hope everyone at the Berlin office lands somewhere worth landing.