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

In February, Deputy CEO Bruce Dixon said in a memo that the once media powerhouse would shut down its website Vice.com (Website is currently live In October, the magazine announced that it would be relaunching the magazine), laid off hundreds of staff, and carried out a major restructuring. Smith, who founded the company in 1994, told legendary music producer Rick Rubin that “woke” content aimed at millennial and Gen Z readers led to the brand’s decline.

Interestingly, Smith said woke content is still generating significant traffic. But that alienated not only Vice’s core audience, but also corporate partners like Disney. (Related: Vice Media’s head of diversity takes over at bank as left-wing media bankrupts and lays off staff)

“From a content standpoint, have you ever pandered content away from something you actually liked?” Rubin asked.

Around 2017, Smith explained: “Vice started to move into this kind of weird awakening era or something. But it was young people writing for themselves, to an audience. It was like our audience was changing from millennials to… , moving on to the so-called Generation Z, and seemed to be writing for themselves, to themselves.By the way, cars were going through the roof, but the old Vice audience, including myself, were like, ‘Here. What are you doing?’

“One of the mistakes was that Vice News was over here and I was focused on that, and I was still killing it and doing awards and stuff, and people were thinking about Vice.com and Vice News. I think it was a mess because there was only Vice.In other words, I’m well aware of the fact that “I wake up and go bankrupt.” But often, when you see something, you think, “What the heck?” Then you go and be awful to someone and they’re like, “Okay, this is what you liked. 10 people watched it. This other one got $100 million, and it’s just That’s what the fucking young people want, you old man, and you’re like, “Oh, well.” The problem with digital media is that it changes depending on the audience. Today’s audience, the young digital consuming audience, is that audience, and that’s the content they want,” he continued.

“So, we had a problem. And definitely, when it came to sellouts, like Disney and other corporate partners, they didn’t want that. We didn’t want that. It was just like this… You know, we had 5,000 employees producing 7,000 parts a day. And all of this came out and said, “This is it. What on earth is that?” you might ask. ‘Did I lose control of my bike? Yeah,” Smith said.

It’s no surprise that Vice has rotted over time and eventually woke up, but Smith is an OG Brooklyn punk-rock hipster who’s not alone in his relationship with someone like him. It’s interesting to get a glimpse of the dynamics between the younger generation who wanted to write songs for. And people like them were the exact opposite of punk rock. What’s even more interesting is that Disney’s corporate litigators, who would have welcomed more woke and diverse content given that Disney movies are exactly that, were turned off by Vice’s new work. is.

I’ve always enjoyed reading Weiss, at least the non-awake parts. Sometimes, when I’m bored with the 2020s, I find myself retrieving some of Vice’s lost posts from before 2017. like a pillar Featuring books by independent publisher Giancarlo DiTrapano, I revisit a strange period in American culture that I look back on fondly: the mid-2010s.