Vice (magazine)

• 1. Born in Montreal

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  Vice magazine began not as a media empire but as a job training scheme. In October 1994, a Quebec government program designed to give social welfare recipients work experience helped launch a publication called Voice of Montreal. Dominique Ollivier and Alix Laurent founded it through a company called Interimages Communications as an English-language spin-off of Images magazine, a multicultural publication. The first issue listed Laurent and Ollivier as publishers, with Suroosh Alvi as editor and Gavin McInnes as assistant editor. Shane Smith joined the staff later.

  The publication planted itself in Montreal's Plateau Mont-Royal and Mile-End neighbourhood, a district alive with emerging collectives: Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Dummies Theatre, Bran Van 3000, and later Arcade Fire all called the area home during the 1990s. Voice of Montreal aimed squarely at that alternative cultural scene, covering music, art, trends, and drug culture, pitching itself against the already-established Montreal Mirror.

  In 1996, Alvi, McInnes, and Smith bought out the original publisher and renamed the magazine Vice. That same year they launched their website under the address Viceland.com, since Vice.com was already taken by someone else. The name change marked a clean break: the publication that had existed to give the unemployed a foot in the door was now in the hands of three young men with ambitions well beyond Quebec.

• 2. New York and Notoriety

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  Richard Szalwinski, a Canadian software millionaire, purchased the magazine and moved its operations to New York City in 1999. The relocation was a turning point in tone. Vice quickly built a reputation for provocative and politically incorrect material, leaning hard into the transgressive identity its Montreal roots had sketched out.

  Under Szalwinski, Vice opened several retail stores in New York where readers could buy fashion items advertised in the magazine's pages. The dot-com crash ended that experiment; the bust forced the stores to close, and the three founders eventually recovered ownership of the Vice brand. From that point, Smith, Alvi, and McInnes controlled the company outright.

  The British edition launched in 2002, with Andy Capper as its first editor. Capper told an interviewer that the magazine's mission was to cover "the things we're meant to be ashamed of," and early issues featured articles on subjects including bodily functions and topics far outside mainstream magazine territory. That founding ethos would haunt the brand for years, becoming both its sharpest asset and its most persistent liability.

• 3. Scale and Serious Journalism

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  By the end of 2007, Vice had grown to 13 foreign editions. The online video channel VBS.com drew 184,000 unique viewers from the United States in August of that year alone. The company had started VBS.tv as a separate domain in 2007, prioritising video over print with free shows including The Vice Guide to Travel.

  The editorial tone was also shifting. Alvi told The New York Times in November 2007: "The world is much bigger than the Lower East Side and the East Village." Issues began covering armed conflict in Iraq alongside the countercultural staples. Entire issues were dedicated to the concerns of Iraqi people, Native Americans, Russian people, and people with mental disabilities.

  McInnes departed in 2008, citing creative differences. In an email dated the 23rd of January, he wrote: "I no longer have anything to do with Vice or VBS or DOs and DON'Ts or any of that. It's a long story but we've all agreed to leave it at 'creative differences,' so please don't ask me about it."

  By February 2013, Vice produced 24 global editions with a combined circulation of 1,147,000 copies, including 100,000 in the United Kingdom. At that point the company employed 800 people worldwide, with 100 of them based in London, and around 3,500 freelancers contributed work. In 2015, Ellis Jones was named editor-in-chief of the magazine, and Alex Miller moved into the role of global head of content.

• 4. The Immersionist Method

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  Vice's journalism was never neutral in its posture. The magazine's editors championed what they called immersionist journalism, a style the publication described as a DIY antithesis to mainstream news methods. It passed that ethos to other Vice Media properties, including the documentary television show Balls Deep on the Viceland Channel.

  The 2007 announcement Vice published online captured the restless spirit of the editorial direction: "After umpteen years of putting out what amounted to a reference book every month, we started to get bored with it. Besides, too many other magazines have ripped it and started doing their own lame take on themes. So we're going to do some issues, starting now, that have whatever we feel like putting in them."

  Shane Smith articulated the political stance in a March 2008 interview with The Guardian. Asked about the magazine's allegiances, he said: "We're not trying to say anything politically in a paradigmatic left/right way... We don't do that because we don't believe in either side. Are my politics Democrat or Republican? I think both are horrific. And it doesn't matter anyway. Money runs America; money runs everywhere."

  In 2013, Vice retracted parts of a fashion spread called "Last Words" that depicted female writers taking their own lives. That same year, the then-editor of the magazine accompanied software millionaire John McAfee as he evaded authorities who wanted to question him in connection with a murder case, drawing considerable unwanted attention to the publication.

• 5. Awards and Controversies

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  Vice collected a series of American Society of Magazine Editors recognitions during its peak years. It won ASME Reader's Choice awards for Best Travel and Adventure for its June 2017 issue, and for Most Delicious for the March 2016 issue. The 2016 anthology award for Best American Magazine Writing went to its "Fixing the System" interview. In 2010, Ad Age ranked Vice ninth on its Magazine A-list, noting it was the first free publication ever to receive that recognition.

  In late 2017, multiple reports appeared alleging sexual misconduct and a persistent "boys club" culture inside Vice Media, Vice magazine's parent company. The allegations added to a pattern of reputational difficulty that stretched back to the publication's earliest days in Montreal, when Voice of Montreal had already established itself as a magazine with a "reputation for provocation."

  In 2010, Vice was described as "gonzo journalism for the YouTube generation." As the brand scaled into a global media company, it faced an ongoing tension between distancing itself from its crude origins and retaining enough of that rebellious identity to hold its core audience.

• 6. Bankruptcy and Return

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  On the 15th of May 2023, Vice Media formally filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The company's lenders, Fortress Investment Group, Soros Fund Management, and Monroe Capital, agreed to purchase nearly all of its assets for $225 million through a credit bid.

  The New York Times, reporting in February 2024, described Vice as "the poster child for the battered digital-media industry," noting that over the preceding half-decade the company had experienced near-annual layoffs and mounting losses. CEO Bruce Dixon announced on the 22nd of February 2024 that "several hundred" additional jobs would be cut and that the Vice.com website would stop publishing. Fortress, which some observers had hoped would reinvest in the company, instead chose sweeping cuts.

  Some journalists who had worked on Vice's technology division Motherboard went on to found 404 Media, described as a spiritual successor to that unit. The print magazine, however, survived. In September 2024, Vice Media relaunched its quarterly print edition with Kevin Lee Kharas as editor-in-chief. The company set a goal of reaching 20,000 subscribers within a year of the relaunch, a modest but concrete target for a publication that had once claimed a global circulation of more than a million copies.