GRADUALLY AND THEN SUDDENLY: How ‘Vice’ Went from a $6 Billion Media Empire to Bankruptcy.
The walls of Vice’s sprawling Brooklyn headquarters were lined with magazine covers charting the company’s transformation from insouciant Canadian post-punk magazine to money-printing media colossus. In early 2018, long before college students discovered that dispatching problematic statues into canals would be reliably met with institutional approval, a group of employees demanded that the covers be removed from the walls.
Not a specific cover. All of them.
The supposed offense varied by complainant. Some referenced covers shot by the recently defenestrated photographer Terry Richardson, an occasional Vice contributor accused of using his position to sexually harass his subjects. Or maybe it was the half-ironic “We Love Cops” cover, a sentiment inconceivable to a generation uncomfortable with both irony and the police. But likely it just was the general unease of working for a publication that once lived up to its name, proudly embracing sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.
The covers were swiftly removed, now sequestered in co-founder Suroosh Alvi’s basement office, where a number of longtime Vice employees gathered to express a collective incredulity. “The resistance starts now,” one of them said hopefully. But we all saw it for what it was: a surrender.
Vice used to be fun. Then it went woke and… you know the rest.