Working at Vice Media Is Not As Cool As It Seems

[rell826]

Working at Vice Media Is Not As Cool As It Seems

Vice Media is one of the hottest media properties in America. It's the counterculture empire that even Rupert Murdoch could love. Vice's founder, Shane Smith, has speculated his company could raise tens of billions of dollars. So why are its employees so broke and pissed off?

Last week, Vice Media and Bacardi had a huge party in a towering event space under the Williamsburg bridge. The former Williamsburg Savings Bank, now a party palace, was lit up like a glowing wedding cake. The line of young, streetwear-clad hopefuls waiting to get in stretched around the block. Inside, glamorous models on stilts teetered through the crowd, and more earthbound models passed out trays of free liquor. Shane Smith and a couple of friends breezed in the front door, straight through the VIP entrance, without even pausing to gladhand on the red carpet.

Shane Smith is, in fact, a Very Important Person now. In addition to becoming a TV star by hosting Vice's HBO show, he is a business star in the media world. Last year, he lured a $70 million investment in his company from 21st Century Fox. That sounded like a lot, until Smith speculated in March that Vice could go public at a valuation of more than $20 billion. That's probably exaggerated, but perhaps not by too much—the same report said that Vice's annual revenue could reach $1 billion by 2016. Barring any economic collapses in the meantime, a public offering would certainly make Shane Smith a billionaire.

Vice Media has a successful cable show, a successful global magazine, and successful websites in multiple verticals, all supported by a successful ad agency that sells the company's cool young audience to major corporate brands. Vice produces some very good journalism. Investors are circling. The founder is rich. The money is flowing, and the parties are lavish. So Vice's headquarters should be packed with happy employees. But it's not.

In the New York media world, Vice has a reputation as a less than ideal employer. A few months ago, we asked Vice employees to tell us what it's like working there. Many responded. And they unanimously said that while Shane Smith is getting rich, they're struggling just to pay the bills.

Most people don't go into the media to get rich. But a company as successful as Vice should be paying decent wages. Vice doesn't. Instead, the company pays ****** wages to low-level employees, "compensating" them instead with the sheer coolness of working for Vice Media. "A handful of grown ups a thin middle layer and a gaggle of people who also moonlight at American Apparel" is how one veteran characterizes the company. "The appeal is street cred, lots of free parties/booze and the hope that one earns a coveted Vice ring." (Literally, a ring that says "VICE," given to lucky employees.)

"VICE editorial across the board is full of very good, smart, and talented employees," one person who spent years there told us. "Unfortunately, we have a bit of a jackass who represents us publicly—and makes an insane amount of money while doing it."

A more specific complaint: the salaries at Vice are low. Very low. Even as Shane Smith watches his millions increase, his employees are pissed that they can hardly afford rent in Brooklyn. One intern two years ago was excited to receive a full time position—until the company offered him a salary of $20K. Employees who have worked there full time within the past two years say that salaries well under $30K are routine for "producers." (One such producer said that after waiting in vain for more than a year for a raise to push their salary up to $30K, they left Vice last year after seeing executives spend what appeared to be thousands of dollars on drugs for a company party.) Editors who worked on Vice's verticals (music, video, fashion, sports, etc.) tell us they started at salaries of $24K-$26K, sometimes rising to a whopping $30K after six months or a year of good performance. For editors who run verticals, salaries are "about $40K," said one ex-employee. And that's at the upper end— "I can tell you that as one of the higher level editors of one of the highest trafficked verticals, I make less than 40k a year," another editor told us.

"A designer for print was making $28K" in 2013, we're told. A video editor who worked for Vice for two years said "the wage was $27K/year." Another person who left recently after holding relatively important editor-level job told us that, in her experience, "Rarely anyone makes over $45,000." Freelancers—writers, photographers, illustrators, and otherwise—tell us the rates are low, and that Vice (like many other publications) is often slow in paying them. Salaries at Vice Media and the company's pay rate for contract work were described to us as "a pittance," "a ******* joke," and "so low I couldn't even consider it, it was offensive."

The low pay is not the only thing that Vice employees hate about Shane Smith's empire. After all, with such awful salaries, nobody would work there if they didn't believe in Vice's mission— speaking truth to power, going where others won't, doing the stories that the mainstream media is too lazy or afraid to do. The contrast between that mission and the reality of some of Vice's business practices seem to bother employees almost as much as the low pay. Quite a few of them scoffed at Shane Smith's assertions in an interview earlier this year that "we don't do branded content, we do content sponsored by brands," and that "No programming has ever been edited for a sponsor." Among the responses we heard from Vice employees on that point:

"Just saw the Shane Smith 'we never edit anything for brands' bit on Gawker. That's ********. They constantly edit to keep brands happy. When I worked on THUMP, we had to delay the release of a film 'Blackout' to not offend Heineken, who had sponsored the vertical's launch. We also had to be sure to cast subjects that met their standards and practices, had to edit out the names of venues, and went through lengthy and irritating approvals processes before any video made it to the website."
"'No programming has ever been edited for a sponsor, he says.' —that's not true. when i wrote for vice they made me edit out all curse words and references to artists with beverage sponsorships, since the content was underwritten by Brisk."
After a writer posted a story critical of Nike, "The sports editor didn't know about brand clearance either and was getting hammered for running the piece because of what a huge account Nike was and how much content they create for them."
"Shane's vague distinction between brand sponsored content and branded content is pure spin. VBS had loads of content in their archive which we would edit together in various different ways in order to snag certain clients on certain occasions."
"Shane's spiel about branded content is ********. They have whole verticals on the site that are sincerely compromised by the brand involvement, none of which seem to realise that if they invested in the edgy, heroin-chic of Vice then they'll get edgy, heroin-chic content. Sort of a reverse Bill Hickian sucking Satan's cock."

The main thing that we heard from current and former Vice employees was frustration. Frustration at Shane Smith's failure to share any of the company's spectacular financial success with his workers; frustration at being taken for granted, on the assumption that Vice was too cool of a job to ever quit. Vice does lots of good work, and Vice knows it, and uses it to its advantage. Most of the Vice employees that spoke to us don't hate Vice—they love(d) it. All they want is decent pay and conditions in which to do the good work that attracted them to the job in the first place.

One former section editor at Vice told of near-poverty-level paychecks and long work hours in a freezing office that made her sick. But her concluding note was one not of outrage, but of disappointment: "I've never been treated worse by a publication I worked towards, and for, that hard."

http://gawker.com/working-at-vice-media-is-not-as-cool-as-it-seems-1579711577/+hamilton_nolan

As a media professional, all I can do was as I read this. VICE employees are getting salaries comparable to fast food workers and it's especially worse considering that these editors and producers have a specialized skill set. Even in a small town in the Midwest or South, you'd make more working for the local media group which speaks volumes. VICE is acting like a startup but has the capital and backing of Fortune 500 companies which makes what they're doing more mind blowing in that their staff is paid well beyond the industry standard. If the job market wasn't as bad and as competitive as media is, they'd have witnessed an exodus a long time ago.

 

[nawghtyhare]

everyone sells out
nothing new

 

[calypso chanta]

"A designer for print was making $28K" in 2013, we're told." 

 

wow. that's terrible. 

 

[wr]

fake grassroots appeal to hipsters

 

[Lake Shore Drive]

@ Shane smith

Back to the oñion to keep me updated on current events

 

[shiznut123]

20B my ***

 

[fran009]

One media outlet talkin bad about another.

Read the article and I couldnt decipher when those former employees left, which is extremely important.

There was also a lot of ambiguity between the remarks of past and current employees.

Plus the fact they mention only one current salary as being "low", however never state how much the person works.

Article is about bringing assumptions, rather than solid information, which should be expected from a gossip website.

 

[nawghtyhare]

One media outlet talkin bad about another.

Read the article and I couldnt decipher when those former employees left, which is extremely important.
There was also a lot of ambiguity between the remarks of past and current employees.
Plus the fact they mention only one current salary as being "low", however never state how much the person works.

Article is about bringing assumptions, rather than solid information, which should be expected from a gossip website.

shane smith that u???

 

[Ox.]

damn, I wonder if the ones who travel have to pay for their own stuff.

 

[HEATHEN]

don't eem care....


as long as the homie Huang keep doing FOB and Simon Ostrovsky keeps dodging bullets and RPGs on the front-lines of Ukraine I'm happy.


AND they got Action Bronson doing a series on Munchies? Oh yeah, me likey.


Listen, unless they're a correspondent putting his *** on the line for ViceNews or Vice, they need to shut the **** up. These **** boy video editors and photographers doing the mundane jobs shouldn't complain. You get what you put in. Notice how Krishna Andavolu, Simon Ostrovsky or Henry Langston don't complain. Why? Because they're actually going around the world covering pertinent issues. Not just sitting in an air-conditioned film room with a cup of starbucks *****ing about pay.


Real ****** do real things. You want the big bucks? Get out of the editing room and put on a vest and be a correspondent. Period. Shane Smith and Suroosh Alvi put their lives on the line by going to some of the seediest places on earth to cover things others in the media would NEVER have the testicular fortitude to do. Pure slander piece by Gawker, nobody is checking for you Nick Denton, nobody. Deadspin even falling off.

 

[illphillip]

Sounds like the Music Business

I ***** with Fightland though.

 

[rell826]

Your post was literally a load of crap coming from a Stan who has no idea how these things work. VICEs response didn't deny the report either.

 

[HEATHEN]

Your post was literally a load of crap coming from a Stan who has no idea how these things work. VICEs response didn't deny the report either.

k.


and vice wouldn't refute the reports, because they're true. not denying that myself.


but fact remains, shane smith and suroosh alvi as well as their correspondents are the ones laying down their lives, fact. thats why they get the big bucks.


you sound like some small potatoes butt-hurt free-lance photographer who can relate to those crying to gawker.

 

[HEATHEN]

and whats even more ironic? you stlll watch vice, same way i do. and you'e not going to stop because of this article either.


all gawker and deadspin does is recycle news articles put out by other outlets and write editorials.


great they pay their ****** employees who put out ****** content well.


thank god for that. exactly what the world needs, lazy journalism.

 

[160jordansdeep]

Shane Smith is that dude

he had people work for nothing his brand blew up and now hes ranking in billions

 

[tomdiginson]

p4l

 

[Coromanti]

Smith is a buckfoy for that.

 

[drones]

It's the same story all over America these days...fat hogs at the top get fatter, while everyone else scrapes for the crumbs. 

 

[am1x90xnike]

This just exposes all the bs these kids are on. "Oh, Vice is so real" looks behind the curtain and gives the wizard a pass.They only criticize the companies/social movements they don't like, but if it is "its just business." Their ideals are about as thin as their ipads. 

All these suburb kids and spoiled rich kids who move into the city/lower income neighborhoods think they are "real" because they don't do mainstream ish...you ain't no more real than the hundred dollar jeans you bought with holes in them. "I'm so unique and different...is what my twitter followers tell me." "I believe [exactly what else everyone on twitter says], and if you don't you're a sheep."

I'm glad they exposed this ******** news station, bunch of rich kids with no idea what it means to be an adult, yet want to go to other nations and tell everyone else how they are doing it wrong, all while uploading from their iphone reading it through their $500 glasses. At least I acknowledge my hypocrisy; these kids won't recognize the meaning of the term. The thought of individuality alludes these people, the thought of actual free thought will always fall on deaf ears. Liberal chumps.

I find hipsters to be hypocrites, I knew vice was a shame from the first episode. I respect what they do, but call it what it is, a bunch of rich kids playing activist.

 

[Mark Antony]

27k in Brooklyn? That's criminal, they should do a piece on themselves.

 

[brandon3000]

View media item 999850
While it seems pretty unfair, that's the life you choose when you work in media/journalism.

When I started with CNN as a Video Journalist (entry level production assistant/associate producer) in 2012 - Atlanta, GA my starting salary was $26K

I left my job with AT&T where my salary was significantly higher to take this job. Why? Because I was more interested in journalism than sales.

i worked very hard for years and now I'm still with the company making a desirable salary on pace to get a significant raise next year if I continue to work my *** off.

While it does seem unfair considering how much Vice probably pulls in across the board, I can't feel bad for them because that was their decision to accept that salary and work for Vice.

Like anything in life, you have to earn it. what happened to climbing to the top? It's like people wanna be hired at these companies and be immediately given a seat at the table. We're not rappers or entertainers. It doesn't work that way.

Hell just about every guest you see on air, is NOT being paid. That's why their always pushing their book or website.

Damn near every host/meteorologist is freelance.

If you're in it for the money, flat out you're in the wrong field unless you're extremely versatile, savvy, and know how to maneuver throughout any company you're with.

 

[newmoanyuh]

Found this out the hard way. If you're not a trust fund baby, it's going to be hard as hell. Not everyone can be out in the field there are editors, designers, programmers, etc who all contribute to make this happen and they're being underpaid 3x as less as people in the same field. I hope their wage practices get better, because the image they portray is too good for this.

 

[el presidente]

27k in Brooklyn? That's criminal, they should do a piece on themselves.

 

 

[degenerate423]

You can't tell me those employees didn't know what they were getting into before they took the job.  They wanted the big name on their resume and they got it.

 

[RustyShackleford]

27k in Brooklyn? That's criminal, they should do a piece on themselves.

 

Shane Smith is such a d-bag