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Shane Smith’s hard-hitting news brand, which covered global current affairs for a Millennial audience, is back, now equal parts creator-driven news outlet and brand partnership vehicle.
By Kevin Dolak
Vice News, the hip current events platform targeted at Millennials and which sought to be “The Economist for young people” during the decade hundreds of journalists spent producing its daily online news and video, is now being resuscitated by company founder Shane Smith, both as a social-platform-first outlet for his podcast and news reports and as a brand partnership vehicle — starting out with a collaboration with Adobe that’s being announced today.
Smith’s media company, which he built from a DIY punk magazine in Montreal into a global juggernaut over 20 years, expanded into hard news in 2014 with the launch of the buttoned-up news brand. Vice News offered a mix of daily written news, feature articles, and eye-popping video styled in the brand’s unique form of parachute journalism — hipster staff correspondents who entered news events with a camera and, at times, narrated the action in first-person. An audience was found online quickly — after all, it came amid the success of the half-hour news series Vice on HBO, which dazzled an expanding audience, running after Real Time with Bill Maher and taking viewers on trips to North Korea with Dennis Rodman.
Vice News 2.0 won’t look much like its initial run, a rep for the company told THR this week. Gone are the days of massive budgets and embeds with the Islamic State. Vice, along with many of the upstart news brands of the 2010s — BuzzFeed News and Mic among them — hit the skids in the following decade or earlier in some cases. Smith’s big swing at legitimizing his media empire, which at its peak boasted 34 bureaus worldwide and several foreign-language editions, filed for bankruptcy in 2023 as the “media bloodbath” he had long predicted came for him and his team.
But Smith, who earned as much of a reputation for hard partying as for charming his way into deep corporate pockets as a shrewd media executive, worked with Vice’s investors to use the brand’s retained YouTube channel to launch his podcast and video series, Shane Smith Has Questions, in 2024. The show, produced by Vice and for its first season, with his pal Maher’s Club Random Studios, examines current events and misinformation.
The podcast also serves as a thread connecting to the brand’s soft relaunch on Wednesday, which will introduce a new but pared-down Vice News website. In addition to hosting Smith’s video podcast series, the second iteration of Vice News will feature a mix of hosted video news segments and the company’s revenue driver: brand partnerships. The former has already begun populating the YouTube channel, with a series titled Vice Inside that brings back some of the correspondents familiar from the 2014 launch to revisit their old stomping grounds and discuss what has happened in the regions and stories they began covering 12 years ago.
The latter is Smith’s focus at this moment, as he’s in Morocco, fulfilling Vice’s end of a partnership brokered with Adobe by filming with a freelance team at the Africa Lion. For his latest deal, VIce will engage the software brand’s PDF Spaces in Acrobat to bring audiences inside the African continent;’s massive annual military exercise. With Adobe’s new PDF tool, the news brand will give readers the ability to surface raw documents and other supporting materials alongside its report on next-generation defense technologies and the future of global security.
“Now more than ever, audiences need transparent, fact-based, nonpartisan journalism,” he said in a statement sent to The Hollywood Reporter. “And as we build VICE News for a new generation, we’re proud to partner with Adobe Acrobat and take our audience even further into the story.”
As a perpetual and prolific dealmaker, this collaboration is likely to be one of many for Smith’s new Vice News. According to a press release on the Adobe partnership, Vice News will return as a “home for a diversity of voices and perspectives” that platforms both veteran journalists and the next generation of digitally native storytellers. And while no new staff has been hired or appears to be imminently joining Smith, the brand can handily tap into the media world’s vast pool of freelance talent and partner with hosts and reporters already established online.
That model is evident in a recent collaboration with Channel 5 and All Gas No Brakes’ Andrew Callaghan. Smith worked with the popular YouTube personality while reporting from Greenland as U.S. troops deployed into the country. Smith was also embedded on the official U.S. visit to Venezuela amid the detention of Nicolás Maduro.
But don’t expect to start seeing a daily dose of intriguing stories from around the world on the web coming from Vice News. Content will come when stories emerge that the vastly shrunken operation sees fit and has the capacity to cover.
“I think we want to go and report on things that maybe others don’t or won’t. And continue that kind of model,” Vice Chief Communications Officer Emily Spence told THR this week. “We’re exploring the brand. There will be a constant cadence of the podcast, but it’ll sort of be dependent on where there’s really interesting storytelling that we can do … we’ll go where the story takes us.”
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