Left to their own vices

When Vice magazine launched in Britain, 10 years ago, it threw a party to celebrate. Five hundred Ecstasy tablets were procured for the occasion. The following Monday morning, the tiny editorial team working out of a shared office space in Shoreditch, East London, found they still had a load left over. The British publisher, Andrew Creighton, then in his late 20s, says he kept the pills in his desk drawer and would give them out to interns or, occasionally, drop one himself before ringing round trying to sell advertising space.

Creighton, who at one point had credit-card debt of £70,000 (HK$820,000) from trying to keep his fledgling title afloat, was having a drink with some investors when the pub’s landlord mentioned he wanted to sell up. “We were drunk and we bought it there and then. We had no money and we had to mortgage our future on it,” he remembers. “It was stupid.”

Originally founded in Canada and produced by small bureaus in New York then London, Vice was given away for free in selected clothes and record shops. The cover of the first British issue featured a line of cocaine on a mirror, and the articles included an interview with radical Islamic cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri, one woman’s account of infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan and the first in a series of incredibly funny, explicit sex guides. The tone was knowing – sex, drugs and parties were all common reference points – but it was also smart, direct and inquiring. The world, it seemed to suggest, was an interesting place full of interesting people, and by hanging out with them and writing about it, we could learn a few things.

“The basic approach was always ‘let’s find weird stuff and then try to explain it to people’,” says Andy Capper, a one-time court reporter for the Liverpool Daily Post who headed the original Vice British editorial team of just four full-time staff. “It was being written by kids we knew and people we were mates with,” he says, chuckling down the line from New York, where he now works as global editor of Vice. “Nobody expected it to last for very long.”

Last year, Vice Media was valued by Forbes magazine at about US$1 billion. The average age of its 800 full-time employees – working in 34 countries – is between 26 and 27. Besides the magazine, they produce videos that are put online: frontline dispatches from Syria and the Gaza Strip; documentaries about heavy metal bands in Baghdad; fashion, music and lifestyle shows. There are dedicated Vice websites in more than 20 countries, with comment, opinion and daily news items posted in addition to magazine content. Company-wide revenues for last year were reported to be about US$200 million.

In December, Vice acquired style magazine i-D for an undisclosed figure. Even its pub, the Old Blue Last, now turns a profit.