Young People Are Angry

Vice Media

Founded 20 years ago by Shane Smith (above) and two friends in Montreal as a scrappy youth magazine, Vice has since mutated into a buccaneering multimedia empire spanning an eclectic website, a TV show, a film production house, an advertising agency and a record label. 

While other media firms rooted in print continue to struggle, it is forecast to make $125m in profit on half-billion dollar revenues this year.

Vice News, a more focused outlet for the kind of video journalism that has recently earned Smith and his team at the much-lampooned "hipster bible" some grudging respect as the unlikely champions of proper, on-the-ground foreign reporting and gritty US domestic stories. 

The online channel's first offerings are rough around the edges – someone forgot to add subtitles to a video package from Sochi – and Smith admits "we are not the greatest at launching things". Still, he promises that "two months in", all glitches will have been eliminated, and Vice will have changed the media weather again.

Long and short foreign video dispatches from its international, multi-ethnic gang of young reporter-hosts will sit alongside what Smith calls an "innovative, unique and beautiful" way of broadcasting breaking news. 

The action at global flash-points, such as Kiev last month, will be live-streamed from a correspondent's iPhone camera, if that's what works, and one even plans to defy mocking depictions of Vice people as real-life Nathan Barleys by filming war zones via his Google Glass.

"Our audience is forcing us to do it," says Smith, who claims to have more than 100 million monthly users across the Vice network as prime-time US cable news shows slide to ratings in the tens of thousands. 

"Young people, who are the majority of our audience, are angry, disenfranchised, and they don't like or trust mainstream media outlets. They're leaving TV in droves, but music and news are the two things that generation Y in every country are excited about and interested in."

Vice News will make no attempt to be comprehensive, Smith says, arguing that slavishly scrambling to "keep up with the Joneses" is what has badly blighted the big media.

 "The problem with the news cycle today and the news media in general is that it's kindergarten [kids] playing soccer. The ball goes over here, everyone goes over here. The ball goes over there, everyone goes over there."