Vice is a brash Brooklyn-based magazine and international media company, but mostly it's a brand of thinking and marketing that has extended itself over the past decade to a popular website and YouTube channel. With bureaus around the world, Vice makes as much news as it reports: A recent foray involved the Vice crew bringing Dennis Rodman to North Korea to meet with Kim Jong Un. There's nothing Vice won't cover — culture, news, war, sex, music, drugs — and it seems to do just fine without any assistance from the rules of old journalism.
And yet it wants a piece of that, too. "Vice," a fast and loose newsmagazine show that debuted on HBO on April 5, shoehorns the company's sense of swagger into something that looks like traditional TV, setting out for the vast Third World to cover "the absurdity of the human condition." It's an exchange of fluids between old media and new.
"Vice" seeks to legitimize the Vice name for HBO viewers who have never heard of it. By pure market value, Vice should have already become the Rolling Stone of its era, but many potential readers have learned that the Vice voice can be off-putting.