VICE’s Long Fade
I used to actually read VICE. Not because it was cool—I mean, yes, but that wasn’t the point. I read it because every issue had something you wouldn’t find anywhere else. Real reporting from places that didn’t matter to bigger outlets. The photography was sick. The writing had swagger that felt earned, not performed. The whole thing carried this implicit message that the world was weirder and more interesting than anyone wanted to admit.
Then it got absorbed into the machine.
The corporation built out all these vertical brands—Noisey, Motherboard, Munchies. Shane Smith stepped back after the sexual harassment allegations came out. Nancy Dubuc took over with Disney and Fox and HBO all quietly holding equity, and for about five minutes it seemed like maybe you could keep the edge under institutional protection. You couldn’t.
This month VICE fired 15 percent of its staff, which is about 1,350 people. They’re collapsing most of the subsidiary brands into a handful of survivors. Waypoint, Amuse, Tonic—they’re all gone. The math is simple: the company lost over 100 million dollars in 2017, probably another 50 million this year. They went from 36 million readers two years ago to 27 million now. The ad money dried up. The mystique wore off.
I stopped reading it somewhere in the last few years without really noticing. The investigations were still competent. The photos were still good. But the thing that made you want to read it—that sense that these people genuinely didn’t care what the establishment thought—had gone completely hollow. It became a glossy magazine that wanted to look rebellious to sell ads. The performance of edge without any actual edge underneath.
This is what happens when you let something grow too fast and forget what you built it for. MTV did this. Probably others I’m not even thinking of. You create something real, something vital, and then the minute it gains traction the money people show up and ask why you’re not maximizing return. So you add more verticals. You hire more people. You optimize the algorithm. You make the thing bigger and bigger until what you originally created has been completely buried under infrastructure.
I don’t know if VICE survives this. Maybe cutting down to size actually lets them find something real again. Or maybe this is just the slow motion death of another publication that mattered and then didn’t.