{"id":1085,"date":"2026-05-06T14:02:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T14:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/2026\/05\/06\/vice-news-is-being-resuscitated-with-fresh-ambitions\/"},"modified":"2026-05-06T14:02:00","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T14:02:00","slug":"vice-news-is-being-resuscitated-with-fresh-ambitions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/2026\/05\/06\/vice-news-is-being-resuscitated-with-fresh-ambitions\/","title":{"rendered":"Vice News Is Being Resuscitated With Fresh Ambitions"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\tVice News<\/a>, the hip current events platform<\/a> targeted at Millennials and which sought to be \u201cThe Economist<\/em> for young people\u201d 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 \u2014 starting out with a collaboration with Adobe that\u2019s being announced today.<\/p>\n

\tSmith\u2019s 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\u2019s unique form of parachute journalism \u2014 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 \u2014 after all, it came amid the success of the half-hour news series Vice<\/em> on HBO, which dazzled an expanding audience, running after Real Time with Bill Maher <\/em>and taking viewers on trips to North Korea with Dennis Rodman.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\tVice News 2.0 won\u2019t look much like its initial run, a rep for the company told \u30cf\u30ea\u30a6\u30c3\u30c9\u30fb\u30ea\u30dd\u30fc\u30bf\u30fc <\/em>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 \u2014 BuzzFeed News and Mic among them \u2014 hit the skids in the following decade or earlier in some cases. Smith\u2019s 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 \u201cmedia bloodbath\u201d he had long predicted came for him and his team.<\/p>\n

\tBut 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, retained the brand\u2019s YouTube page in the fire sale of the company\u2019s assets to private equity. He launched his podcast and video series, Shane Smith Has Questions<\/em>, on the platform in 2024. The show, produced by Vice and his friend Maher\u2019s Club Random Studios, examines current events and misinformation.<\/p>\n

\tThe show also serves as a thread connecting to the brand\u2019s soft relaunch on Wednesday, which will introduce a new but pared-down Vice News website. In addition to hosting Smith\u2019s video podcast series, the second iteration of Vice News will feature a mix of hosted video news segments and the company\u2019s revenue driver: brand partnerships. The former has already begun populating the YouTube channel, with a series titled Vice Inside<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

\tThe latter is Smith\u2019s focus at this moment, as he\u2019s in Morocco, fulfilling Vice\u2019s 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\u2019s PDF Spaces in Acrobat to bring audiences inside the African continent;\u2019s massive annual military exercise. With Adobe\u2019s new PDF tool, the news brand will give readers the ability to surface raw documents and other supporting materials<\/a> alongside its report on next-generation defense technologies and the future of global security.<\/p>\n

\t\u00a0\u201cNow more than ever, audiences need transparent, fact-based, nonpartisan journalism. And as we build VICE News for a new generation, we\u2019re proud to partner with Adobe Acrobat and take our audience even further into the story.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\tAs a perpetual and prolific dealmaker, this collaboration is likely to be one of many for Smith\u2019s new Vice News. According to a press release on the Adobe partnership, Vice News will return as a \u201chome for a diversity of voices and perspectives\u201d 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\u2019s vast pool of freelance talent and partner with hosts and reporters already established online.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\tThat model is evident in a recent collaboration with Channel 5 and All Gas No Brakes\u2019<\/em> 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 Nicol\u00e1s Maduro.<\/p>\n

\tBut don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

\t\u201cI think we want to go and report on things that maybe others don\u2019t or won\u2019t. And continue that kind of model,\u201d Vice Chief Communications Officer Emily Spence told THR<\/em> this week. \u201cWe\u2019re exploring the brand. There will be a constant cadence of the podcast, but it\u2019ll sort of be dependent on where there\u2019s really interesting storytelling that we can do \u2026 we\u2019ll go where the story takes us.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vice News, the hip current events platform targeted at Millennials and which sought to be \u201cThe Economist for young people\u201d 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 \u2014 starting out with a collaboration with Adobe that\u2019s being announced today. Smith\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1086,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[94,95,2,678],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","category-business-news","category-hollywood","category-vice-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1085"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1085\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}