Yesterday at TechCrunch Disrupt New York, there were a ton of interesting talks and interviews. On of the most interesting was Ryan Lawler‘s chat with Shane Smith, the Co-Founder and CEO of Vice. This chat was interesting for a number of different reasons. Firstly, Vice is rapidly becoming a major media empire. I really had no idea the extent of the Vice network. There are some 10 different Vice media channels covering everything from traditional news, to fashion, to technology, to sports, to MMA fighting. Secondly, the talk completely changed my personal view of Vice. Perhaps because Vice is directly opposed to all of the traditional media outlets, I have had an incredibly tainted view of the company. I had fallen into the trap of assuming that Vice’s reporting was/is “putting on a safari hat and looking at some poop.” After hearing Seth Smith talk about the company’s goals and mission, and after looking through some of their content, I am truly impressed and have come to realize that my view was completely wrong.

Time Warner of The Street

Smith went into a great amount of detail on Vice’s approach to journalism. Smith argued that traditional news media outlets have essentially disenfranchised Gen Y. There is a widely held belief in these news outlets, Smith argued, that young people don’t care about news, especially international news. However, through research and testing, Smith concluded that Gen Y is in-fact consumed with news, however they (we) have become disillusioned with the CNNs of the world. These are exactly the people the Vice is producing news for.

As a result of being pitched to and marketed to for their whole lives, Smith argued, the current generation is made up of the, “most sophisticated bullshit detectors of all time.” Therefore, Vice represents an attempt to cover news in an authentic way; a response to the failure of traditional journalism. Vice News takes a documentary approach to news, and makes a point to cover the stories that aren’t getting play on the traditional outlets. The success of Vice News, according to Smith, is based wholly on the fact that they do not cover the news like journalists. Rather, “We immerse into a story, come at from documentary film making perspective and report the story not being told.”