Another online magazine bites the dust.
It was reported last week that Vice Media, ‘the former poster child of the digital media revolution’, is to make redundant hundreds more employees and ‘cease website operations’, moving instead to a “studio model”.
Vice started as a punk magazine called the Voice of Montreal in 1994 before it moved to New York, retaining its reputation as an edgy and often provocative publisher, with editions worldwide. It later branched out into news, audio and television.
Last year, however, the company filed for bankruptcy and was sold for $350 million having been valued ‘at about $5.7 billion’ in 2017.
I have no interest in Vice (I was too old, even when it was launched, to be part of the target audience), but our paths did cross once or twice.
In 2016 a Forest fringe event at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham was featured in an article that gave it a surprisingly positive review:
What the party was like: Actually really good. An upper-middle market bar packed to the gills with free booze, mini burgers, pocket ash-trays (a weird plastic wallet thing you can carry around) inscribed with the words, "Say no to outdoor smoking bans," and leaflets about how "A once benign nanny state has become a bully state, coercing rather than educating adults to give up tobacco."
Entertainment: It was advertised as "Eat. Drink. Smoke. Vape.", so like all good parties there were no frills beyond the amount of inebriants you could stuff in your body.
A few years later we were contacted by another Vice journalist and I spent two hours being interviewed for an article that was never published.
I was subsequently approached by a ‘casting producer’ who wanted to interview me for a subsidiary Vice project and nothing came of that either, but I wasn’t surprised because it was clear by then that the former ‘punk magazine’ was fully on board the anti-smoking juggernaut and any views that opposed the Establishment-led orthodoxy on tobacco had no place in the world of Vice.
(Oh, the irony.)
The most obvious example of Vice abandoning its punk origins was the launch in April 2019 of a £5 million ‘Quit Cigarettes’ initiative funded by the tobacco giant Philip Morris International (PMI), whose goal is a smoke-free (sic) world.
Featuring some of the most puerile articles I have ever read on any subject, headlines included:
How Smoking Increases Chances of Genital Warts
This Is How Smoking Makes Your Penis Shrink
How Smoking is Ruining Your Sex Life
Is Smoking a Deal-Breaker on Tinder?
Are Festivals Doing Enough to Phase Out Smoking?
How Cigarettes Blight British Seaside Towns
Why It’s Time to Ban Smoking in Airports For Good
Are You Being Bullied Into Smoking Cigarettes?
As I wrote here, the project ‘seemed determined to belittle smokers and their habit and was so tedious I eventually stopped visiting the site because I couldn’t imagine that anyone would take it seriously’.
To this day I would love to know how PMI execs justified the expense, but this is a company that also threw hundreds of thousands of dollars the way of the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World (before parting ways last year), so I guess £5 million was small change.
As for Vice, in 2016, when she was 19, my daughter offered this damning appraisal:
"It's written by a bunch of pathetic twenty somethings who hate anyone who doesn't agree with their uni politics.
"They pass their bitterness off as sarcastic humour. I much prefer Dazed and Confused if you're gonna read that stuff."
See also: My brush with Vice and its help to quit smoking project (July 2019)
PMI-funded Quit Cigarettes initiative stubbed out (February 2020)
Below: Vice promoting its Quit Cigarettes initiative on the London Underground in 2019
