No Ordinary Media Company, No Ordinary Time

Test: 2020 has been a challenging year for everyone, including media companies. How has VICE been impacted and how have you adapted?

Since the pandemic began, we’ve been in pursuit of not just surviving, but thriving. VICE has always found strength and gone back to its scrappy roots during times of adversity. We were quick and decisive from day one to ensure we could keep delivering for ourselves, our audience and our partners.

We looked at the very real burnout that began to set in after a few months of working from home, especially for those caring for children and parents. We began instituting two-hour blocks on calendars for employees to take time for themselves during the day. We also began “Days of Pause,” extra paid holidays to extend a weekend and give everyone a break from their screens. That series continues in November with a global “Day of Cause” pegged to Election Day in the U.S., during which we’ve encouraged employees to use the day to contribute to causes they care about.

Creatively, we’ve pivoted with incredible speed and ingenuity. On VICE News Tonight, we filmed correspondents live from their living rooms. Pulse, one of our (VICE) Studio businesses, had directors making films about themselves and their families intimately in quarantine. For Patagonia beer, they shot a beautiful spot showing how to bring the outdoors inside during this isolating time. VICE TV, too, rose to the challenge of COVID-19, making a quarantine variety show created remotely with our staff.

On the advertising sales front, we are taking a surgical approach to the marketplace, identifying the needs and coming up with unique solutions for our clients that are creatively in tune with the times. It’s difficult out there, especially given the monopoly that platforms have created in the marketplace. But we are leading with empathy and an unparalleled understanding of the youth mindset, because propping up young and underrepresented voices is more important than ever.

We’ve also seen the benefits of a lot of hard work done in the last year to diversify the business. Since I arrived, we’ve been realigning ourselves to better compete in the ever-changing media landscape; what should have taken more than two years took us one. We created global reporting structures aligned to each of our five lines of business. We continue to be nimble, because the landscape will continue to move and shift at warp speed.

Test: VICE owns a production studio, a cable network, and an ad agency. How would you say that the lines between advertising, journalism and television are blurring?

I’d say the crossover we’re seeing is substantial, and the mix and format that storytelling takes will continue to evolve as the world, collective consciousness, and available platforms for consuming content evolve.

We are very focused on driving intellectual property — incubating original content and developing multiple offshoots that can create deeper connections between our audience and our brand. For example, Refinery29’s Money Diaries franchise is not only a digital editorial column with social media components, but will soon be transformed into another incarnation that we can’t announce yet. We’ve also created derivative content around Money Diaries for advertising partners like Intuit.

Advertisers are looking for credibility with young people because, as Shane Smith says, young people have bullshit detectors. Understanding this, we are an attractive partner because we do take a journalistic, immersive and fearless approach to storytelling. We recently partnered with Levi’s on The 2020 Project, a documentary series that explored the key issues that matter most to first-time voters leading into the 2020 election. This is a series we would do anyway, and we found a partner with aligned values to give those young voices a bigger platform together.

Virtue, our creative advertising agency, leverages the same insights as our publishing business to create work, and often taps into our journalists, who are on the front lines of seeing this changing world. We are well-positioned to play across the spectrum in ways that respect our audience, who we value immensely.

In the end, I will never waiver from my belief that creative always wins. It’s our job to ensure that it is translated into the best possible formats and published in the best possible ways to serve the stories themselves, and, ultimately, the audience.

Test: Your company is known for telling edgy and unexpected stories that often aren’t covered by the mainstream media. What is the secret to creating content that rises above the noise?

In a word, fearlessness. Fearlessness can be felt in our immersive approach to reporting, through our penchant for pursuing the long-tail story, and with the way we encourage our employees to be bold, and to bring every part of who they are to the work that they do.

Journalism begins in the field — at the street level, and with human connection. We are committed to allowing our staff the space and forums for expressing themselves, because little progress can be made in being comfortable all the time. We’re on a constant mission to become the most progressive youth media company in the world.

Test: What skills or qualities does VICE prioritize when hiring young storytellers?

We are a company that prides itself on placing trust and autonomy in the hands of our employees, so we look for people that will thrive in an environment like ours — self-starters who are motivated with a great deal of spirit and curiosity.

We have also recognized that this has been an incredibly tough year for those young people on the cusp of entering the workforce. The world needs them and we need them, which is why we launched something called The 2030 Project to hire five full-time fellows to spend a year with us examining the future of everything from dating and relationships to entertainment and activism. Born from a Gen Z insights project of the same name that envisioned what the future could look like in 10 years, this project takes it a step further by handing our platform and resources over to this generation to create that future.

From a more nuts and bolts perspective, we are in the process of fortifying our hiring practices from a diversity, equity and inclusion perspective so that we can lead the industry with a focus on actions and results. Just before the pandemic hit, we brought on a new people and culture leader in Daisy Auger-Dominguez, who has transformed the way we view these practices to thread through everything that we do. With an even greater commitment to DEI in our hiring, we will realize our mission more strongly by ensuring that we continue to prop up young and diverse voices.

Test: Having evolved from a print magazine to a multimedia leader, what’s your vision for VICE’s future?

Right now we are on a path to profitability so we can better control our destiny and growth, which is essential to our viability and future.

We will continue to double down on news through our VICE News division worldwide. Young people want to hear from sources they trust and see diverse young voices speaking to them — people who are as diverse, curious and open-minded as they are. We credit our approach: unflinching, telling the stories other outlets won’t go near, and the relationship that we’ve developed over the years with our audience. It’s something we don’t take for granted, and something we need to continue to preserve and build upon.

We’re also focused on continuing to evolve and innovate around the way we create and amplify culture with and for a generation that is going to inherit and change the world. The way I look at it, this should be VICE Media Group’s Super Bowl moment. History tells us that moments like the one we’re living through now lead to massive cultural transformation. From the 1918 Spanish flu to the roaring ‘20s, post-World War II to economic expansion, postmodernism and the era of rock and roll, the 2008 Great Recession to the tech revolution — in every case, there is a traceable bright line of before and after change. Values shift, aesthetics evolve, creativity explodes, and youth culture is redefined loudly.

One of our biggest differentiators is our global reach and the people we have on the ground in more than 25 countries worldwide. Global perspectives are something we’ll continue to grow and nurture throughout the whole of the business, along with our deep commitment to inclusiveness in everything that we do.

These ambitions are lofty by design. My leadership team and our staff are here for these reasons — for a chance to genuinely create impact in a world that’s on fire.