We Want Media

I have to hand it to Vice TV. While we agree that most print media have a hard time making the dive into digital, Vice Magazine kind of nails it.

With Spike Jonze on board as creative director, Vice’s latest venture, VBS.tv, has me LOLing like I just discovered irony.

VBS takes all the vulgarity, irony, snarkiness and elitism that I love from the magazine and makes it walk and talk in the form of internet television. They keep a lot of the same stuff from the magazine, like their “Dos & Don’ts,” but add new stuff including high-profile commentators like Chloë Sevigny, Sarah Silverman and Johnny Knoxville.

It makes sense that Vice would be able to do this successfully because they have always kind of been like the internet, even when it was just a magazine. But along those same lines, VBS echoes a lot of our concerns about citizen journalism. As you can see from their mission statement, Vice is using this new medium to help them move away from just talking about cocaine, supermodels, being cool and denim to actually getting political and covering—gasp!—Darfur.

If you’re familiar with Vice, I’m sure you can see why VBS covering Darfur makes me nervous. They’re hardly the well-rounded professional journalists that we trust. And if you watch this piece on Darfur you can see their reporting is anything but typical. OK, they do take a lot of chances that journalists don’t. But just going to Darfur, making some reductive statements about the war and having confusing interviews doesn’t offer me any sort of complete story on this.

But at least they are addressing these issues. Perhaps this is why Vice still has their finger on the global pulse while Nylon TV offers little more than Kimora Lee Simmons talking about gravity-defying breasts.