VICE

And now, it's circling the drain! HAHAHAHAHA

VICE (which makes money but doesn't print news) is now in partnership with The Guardian (which does neither, and oh btw sucks up to Jimbo Wales). What could possibly go wrong?

VICE is the McDonald's of journalism, like you're cruising through the intarwebs when you happen to spot a VICE article with IN DEPTH coverage on the pressing issues of our times, often supplemented by HARD HITTING videos featuring men fucking blow-up dolls, you see it, click out of compulsion and end up hating yourself by the time it's over. And yet you always end up coming back for more to see if their latest batch of spew was as good as the last. It's essentially what happens if TMZ took some heroin and drifted away from celebrity bullshit to make news articles about the truly pointless shit. You ever read the tabloids at your local Publix and other places where you worked as the bagging man? VICE amounts to that in the online way, proving there's no escaping the bullshit scent and allure of it, and the topic titles alone have about as much kookiness as if the b& 13-year-old Uncyclopedians wanted to sound smart and get paid by the word for it, and make a news site of their own to rival CNN and Fox.

Where it came from

He sings, he dances, he gobbles up your shawarma!

Is a shit-eating, donkey-fucking LIE. Go and look at the "Founder" page. It only mentions the current CEO and preening media whore, Canuckistan manbearpig Shane Smith, and says nothing about the other two assholes who helped: Suroosh Alvi, who apparently still works for VICE as a journalist. (It's fucking hilarious that they send him out to report on the heroin trade, since he's already had a little problem with monkeys on his back.)

	“	It's a long way from the Bifteck, the bar in the Plateau area of Montreal where Mr. Smith first drunkenly encountered Suroosh Alvi (then a recovering heroin addict) and learned he was creating a magazine with their mutual friend Gavin McInnes.	„

And VICE's website especially fails to mention the superhuman asshole and professional blog troll Gavin McInnes. Smith, an increasingly-fat and increasingly-old demon, has basically "laundered" the history of VICE to remove all mention of McInnes, a charming and bold piece of monkey humanity who likes to eat urine-soaked corn flakes and claims to be the "father of hipsterism".

He later started something called the "Proud Boys", a mutual masturbation club just two steps away from becoming a violent street gang. Lol at the poor little masculinist and "pro-life" fool. When the "Proud Boys" became a liability and the FBI started asking questions, McInnes cheerfully cut them loose. If you really want to learn more about the chode, go to The Rebel Media.

This motley gang of nitwits started VICE as a print magazine in Montreal in 1994, ~~since apparently Montreal didn't have enough hip and cool-assed print media for college students already.~~ People only read it because it was free. For all the late 1990s and well into the 2000s, vice.com was just another boring and ugly pornsite (see 2003 capture). Then in 2011, long after the porn operators abandoned it, Mr. Smith the Michelin Man managed to seize the domain. Prior to that VICE had been using viceland.com and vbs.tv; the earliest archive is from 2006.

For lextreeeem lolz, this remembrance by an early VICE employee is gold:

“	I worked alongside McInnes at the start of Vice in 1994, becoming the magazine’s editor shortly after it moved from Montreal to New York in 1999. Though McInnes immediately struck me as someone to avoid outside of work, nothing then indicated he would hatch an organization as vitriolic and violence-prone as the street-brawling Proud Boys. He and I were never friends. Founding editor Suroosh Alvi—who remains at Vice Media with the title of founder—brought me on board as a writer at the same time as McInnes. And when I stepped down in early 2001, it was largely because of McInnes’s toxic attitude. (By then his title was cofounder.) Vice’s third cofounder, Shane Smith, was integral to the arc of McInnes’s life. He was—before their very public falling out—McInnes’s bandmate, roommate, rival, and best friend. Close since the age of 12, they shared everything from mescaline (then the Canadian name for PCP or horse tranquilizer) to lovers. How tight were they? A 2002 book they coauthored, The Vice Guide to Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll, claims that McInnes once unwittingly squeezed his penis into the same condom as Smith’s during a threesome.	„

Shane loves to travel and claim to be a "globetrotting journalist", when actually he's a hairy hambeast who trolls free buffets whenever possible. Profiles of him usually include the term "hard-partying".

	“	I'm Shane Smith, co-founder of VICE, a magazine I started in Montreal in 1994 that has since become a global company operating in 30 countries. I also went to North Korea twice, and starred in the VICE Guide to North Korea, which featured footage of my trip. Most recently I went to Liberia, a war-torn country in Africa plagued with heroin dens, teenage prostitution, and even cross-dressing cannibals; and then to the North Korean labor camps hidden in the forests of Siberia.	„
	—--So the liar says

	“	“That’s great, because I like food and I like booze”	„
	—--from the Financial Times, who paid for it

	“	Today Vice, which started in 1994 in Montreal as a niche music magazine, is an international brand with 800 employees in 34 countries, several online video channels, and an advertising agency with clients that include Vodafone and Nike. The print magazine has 1m readers globally and, according to company projections, revenues are set to exceed $200m. Next year it will launch Vice, an HBO news magazine TV show aimed at young people, and an online news network in 18 different countries, which will blend live programming with documentaries.	„
	—--blah blah blah

	“	“Shane Smith is to Journalism what Jared from Subway is to Free the Children” — Johnny Knoxville	„
	—https://notvice.com/shane-smith-billionaire-and-regular-guy-8c27a76e9598#.lrw65vm68

	“	When asked about the Shane mythology, Gavin McInnes, co-founder of Vice and friend since age 12, tells a different story. According to McInnes, Shane lied about selling coke and being in a gang. While Shane told Charlie Rose, Spike Jonze, The Guardian and Joe Rogan that he left home at age 13, McInnes informed me that Smith simply went from living with his mother to living with his father. Now, trusting Gavin wholesale might be a one-way ticket over the coo-coo’s nest but, just as his bio indicates, he is more than just a rude lunatic who keeps getting beat up. I fact-checked the gang affiliation by comparing it to the historical crime data and it leads me to side with the lunatic. For Shane to have known a dozen dead gang members in Canada’s capital, he would have had to associate with every gang member that died over the course several years. I also can’t find anyone who can verify Shane’s story— people fall silent.	„
	—https://notvice.com/shane-smith-billionaire-and-regular-guy-8c27a76e9598#.lrw65vm68

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Needless to say, his moron enemies at Gawker Media were constantly trying to shit in his Dom Pérignon, perhaps because Smith is worth more than Nick Denton. Altho now that Gawker is dead meat baby, yo Shane is off the hook. Or so he thinks! 1 2.
And he spent $300,000 on dinner in Las Vegas, which Gawker thinks is "real-important-like". Denton is one to talk. 3

Betcha didn't know that Rupert Murdoch is a part owner:

	“	Although Vice started as a print mag, the company found its niche online. The top story on Vice.com around the time of the 21st Century Fox sale was “Kings of Cannabis” (subhead: “You might not know who Arjan Roskam is, but you’ve probably smoked his weed”). Content-wise, this was a departure for Murdoch, whose portfolio of headlines at News of the World tended to implicate media stars and royalty, rather than readers, in drug use. (“Shamed TV star Leslie is caught snorting cocaine” and “Harry’s drugs shame” ran the headlines on two such dispatches in 2002.) Yet Vice Media does sit on the young-ish end of the tabloid continuum, and as Andrew Neil, former editor of the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times, told Frontline of his former boss, “tabloids is what really gets him out of bed in the morning. . . . Not journalism—tabloid journalism is in his veins.” For Vice CEO Shane Smith, forty-three, the alliance with eighty-two-year-old Murdoch was a coming-of-age moment. The Vice operation started in Canada as a magazine called the Voice of Montreal; founders Smith, Gavin “Godfather of Hipsterdom” McInnes, and recovering heroin addict Suroosh Alvi claim they went on the government dole in 1994 to fund the glossy, ad-heavy, free publication. (In one of the many examples of how Vice’s brand of self-promotional authenticity doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, the Ryerson Review of Journalism reported that the trio borrowed start-up money from their parents.)	„
	—--http://www.thebaffler.com/articles/the-vertically-integrated-rape-joke

What it does lol

OPEN THE CHAMPAGNE, IT'S TIME TO PAAAARTAY

VICE's resident Williamsburg hipster slime are underpaid to cover all sorts of truly fascinating stories such as what would happen to a woman's ovary if they got frozen eggs, if multiple personality disorder isn't really a disorder, filling the void your mom left behind in your empty soul when she left you, finding out how weed can dry up your vajayjay, and how having no life inside a bookstore can make you meet the world's most famous slut. And those are only the ones on the "most popular" list right now.

Almost every article is a TL;DR snorefest with lots of fact spewing to the point where it can't be understood without lots of more explaining, and would make Fact Cat upchuck into his litterbox if he were forced to read some of them. Be warned that you will leave with a facepalm and headache guaranteed. The remaining articles are infamous for being way too short to give a shit about, even with something like Morgan Freeman on the bandwagon to legalize said weed, and are only used as filler fodder in order to link up other short shit stories. Thus, those articles are TS;DC: Too short; didn't care.

The only source of any real lulz is their NSFW section, with lots of truly thought-provoking and penetrating articles on:

The plastic surgeon who Snapchats his surgeries
The right way to make feminist porn
Stores that are willing to buy your dead grandpa's stash of early 1900's Playboys
What it's indeed like to be an 82-year-old sex star on Adam4Adam
Explaining what it truly means to be a professional sub
Feeder fetishes [1]
Sex toys for the disabled [2]
This speaks for itself (666 added because VICE is subtle like that, no joke)
How life is better with a dildo than a real dick
The fucking Castration Truck, to the joy of sick fucks everywhere, and yes, someone has indeed cummed to that
The Aussie dude who does paintings with his donger
The donkey-fuckers of Colombia
How Norway was butthurt over the Colombian donkey fucking piece
Anal is awesome [3]
VICE writer shoves things in his asshole to fight homophobia [4]
A notorious piece about man building things "for eternity". It was saturated with stupid factual errors; some were fixed after commentors ribbed the author, some were not fixed.
Vice actually having an article on people wanting to perform anilingus on the fucking Grinch
The stupid "Dos and Don'ts" on their website (which they later got rid of because McInnes said he invented them lol)

That's mostly on page ONE. There's 25 more pages of truly spectacular and totally necessary news about porn and sexual perversions alone. Given that the Uncyclopedians think their audience won't rub one out to their stories, and is pretty much the only reason anyone even still goes to the site anymore. VICE might as well be rebranded as Porn News Network and the creators would be richer than Scrooge.

The comments section in each article range from "I came" to complaining about how shitty, short or lame it is, showing just how low the site started out, since it was made earlier this year and had only sunk lower to the point of desperate. One gets the feeling their articles are copycats of other news sites or are too old to be relevant anymore. And for more proof of how they're sinking like an anvil in the Marianas Trench, for example in the end of the Morgan Freeman weed article, notice how they can't even count. State you have five related weed stories, yet only show four? Such genius kookiness.

MONEY FIRST

Now that VICE is "established" as a "media empire thing" for the tragic-stupid side of the millennial demographic, Smith and his lawyers have been doing the classic Murdoch legal tricks. This includes threatening some minor LA band for having a name that is "too similar". Plus suing companies with "similar names" to bits of their own empire. (Yes kiddies! VICE owns an ad agency.) Don't forget VICE's tendency to use unpaid interns to save dough. "We can't just report things! We have to start our own cable-tv channel!"

And the best part, killing stories because their "brand partners" were unhappy. Big bad Shane, rolls over and pussies out whenever money comes up. The awesome punk-rocker dude, "investigative journalist", turns into a Murdoch drone when money shits from the sky onto his head. He doesn't "investigate" anything but ad revenue and cross-marketing deals. And buffet tables.

	“	In September, Davis says Vice killed another two of his pieces, one about unpaid labor in Hollywood, and another containing explosive allegations of sexual assault against a rock musician and a major Hollywood figure......On Sept. 10, Taete wrote back to say that Miller asked to hold the piece about the two celebrities, and Schilling replied that “Alex said no to the unpaid Hollywood piece,” the other one. Davis then emailed Miller to ask why his piece had been killed but received no response, he says. He later pitched the article to a different magazine, The Baffler, which published it online yesterday.... And Vice has often actually published stories that were bad news for brands with which the company does business or might need to do business, whatever the process behind their publication. Consider this post on the National Football League in the wake of the Ray Rice scandal; this post about Google’s response to the N.S.A. surveillance story (Vice Media has an extensive relationship with Google and YouTube); or this piece on how the Amazon Fire is “the most polluting smartphone” (Vice worked with AT&T on the ad campaign for the phone).	„
	—--emphasis added for emphasis

Again with the Vanity Fair rant by former VICE editor Adam Gollner. [[quote|Smith today serves as executive chairman of Vice Media. He is considered an internet-age pioneer, having expanded an indie magazine into a global powerhouse. He is sometimes referred to as “Citizen Shane” among certain ex-colleagues, as much for his Hearst-like legacy as a media baron, huckster, and former purveyor of yellow journalism as for his Xanadu-like home in Santa Monica. In April, Smith’s wife, Tamyka, filed for divorce, and the mansion was sold for $48.7 million—the approximate amount, according to The Wall Street Journal, that Vice Media lost in 2019. Smith declined to be interviewed for this story.}}

Sexual harassment? RUH ROH

	“	Last week may have offered a preview of what's to come. A piece published by the Daily Beast examined Vice's "sexual-harassment culture," and implicated a high-profile producer at the company. That story led to a suspension for Jason Mojica, Vice's lead filmmaker and former editor-in-chief, who was said to have dismissed complaints about sexual harassment and to have made inappropriate comments. Reached by CNNMoney, Mojica declined to comment. The Daily Beast's reporting only heightened the sense of dread consuming Vice's journalists. Conversations with 10 employees in the company's television and digital departments -- a mix of reporters, correspondents and editors -- revealed a sinking sense of morale at Vice's Williamsburg headquarters. There is an assumption that the claims in the Daily Beast story will not be the last. Many of those same Vice employees said the company's leadership has exacerbated an already-tense situation. And some female staff members lamented how awkward it's made the current news cycle....The internal frustration reached a fever pitch on Friday, when Vice held its latest "state of the union," highlighted by a 45-minute pre-recorded video package featuring co-founders Shane Smith and Suroosh Alvi, along with other executives. Appearing with other employees, they discussed various matters and concerns, but sexual harassment and misconduct were left unaddressed.	„
	—--lolol

	“	The Daily Beast article, based on accounts from over a dozen women, depicted a culture at Vice that fostered sexist comments, inappropriate touching and pressure for women to have sex with their superiors. When some of the women tried to report the behavior, they were effectively told to suck it up......The Awl news site was the first to bring the rumors about the Times story out in the open last week. Employees at Vice have been whispering about it for much longer than that. Senior management certainly seems to have known about it for at least as long as it took to plan and produce Friday’s video. As one employee put it, “Upper management hasn’t addressed the Times story at all, but everyone knows it’s coming. I mean, you don’t announce Gloria Steinem over the Daily Beast story.”	„
	—--double lolololol

OOPSIE OOPS

2023 rolled around and it began to decline in a serious way. Chapter 11, then taken over by creditors, who started firing people. Then came 2024 and the shitrain began. The website might disappear at any moment. The VICE TV show on HBO and Showtime was long defunct. Shane was nowhere to be found.

	“	“Moving forward we will look to partner with established media companies to distribute our digital content, including news, on their global platforms, as we fully transition to a studio model.”	„
	—--wtf does that mean

Videos

	“	The stuff you're trying to look at is considered "naughty" by busybodies, legal types, and (probably) your mom	„
	—VICE's NSFW warning to every college dropout slacker nerd still living with his mom, which is their target audience.