‘What The F*ck Is This?’: ‘Woke’ Journalism Fueled Vice Media’s Downfall, Shane Smith Admits

Vice Media co-founder Shane Smith said in an October podcast that “woke” journalism, written by younger generations of staffers, contributed to the company’s spectacular collapse earlier in 2024.

In February, Vice CEO Bruce Dixon said in a memo that the company, once a media powerhouse, was shutting down its vice.com website (the website is live now in October, with an announcement that its magazine was relaunching), laying off hundreds of staffers and undergoing significant restructuring. Smith, who started the company in 1994, told legendary music producer Rick Rubin that “woke” content catering to Millennial and Generation Z readers contributed to the brand’s downfall.

Interestingly, Smith said the woke content still generated tons of traffic. However it alienated not only Vice’s core audience but also corporate partners like Disney. (RELATED: Vice Media’s Diversity Chief Made Bank As Left-Wing Media Outlet Went Bankrupt, Laid Off Staffers)

“From a content perspective, did you ever pander your content away from what you actually liked?” Rubin asked.

Around 2017, Smith explained, “Vice started moving into this sort of weird woke era or whatever. But it was young people writing for themselves for the audience. It was like our audience went from Millennials to whatever that is — Gen Z — and they were writing for themselves, to themselves. By the way, traffic was through the roof, but the old Vice audience, including me, was like, ‘What are we doing here?’”

“One of the mistakes was that Vice News was over here, which I was concentrating on, and it was still killing it and doing awards and all that stuff, but people didn’t differentiate between vice.com and Vice News. There was just Vice, and so I think that was a fuck up. We should have had a lot more differentiation. I mean, the ‘go woke, go broke’ thing, I’m well aware of, and a lot of times I’d see stuff and you would be like, ‘What the fuck?’ Then you go to give someone shit, and they’re like, ‘Okay, this is the one you liked; 10 people saw it. This other piece got 100 million, that’s just what fucking young people want, you old man.’ And you’re like, ‘Oh, well.’ It’s a problem with digital media, in that it changes with the audience. The audience now, that young digital-consuming audience, is that audience, and that’s the content they want,” he continued.

“So, it became problematic. And definitely, speaking of selling out, like Disney or any of those corporate partners, they didn’t want that; we didn’t want that. It was just sort of this … you know, we had, I don’t know, 5,000 employees doing 7,000 pieces a day, and all of this stuff would come out and you’d be like, ‘What the fuck is this this?’ Did we lose control of the bicycle? Yeah,” Smith said.

It’s not a surprise that Vice rotted with time and eventually became woke, but it’s interesting to hear Smith give a glimpse into the dynamics between someone like him, who’s the O.G., punk rock Brooklyn hipster, and the younger generations who wanted to write for themselves and people like them, who were very much the opposite of punk rock. Even more interesting to hear that the corporate suits at Disney, who you would think would welcome more woke and diverse content, considering their movies are often just that, were turned off by Vice’s new stuff.

I’ve always enjoyed reading Vice, at least the pieces that weren’t woke. Sometimes when I’m bored of the 2020s, I’ll retrieve Vice’s lost pre-2017 posts, like the columns of independent publisher Giancarlo DiTrapano, and revisit the mid-2010s, a weird era in American culture that I look back on fondly.