4/8/13 Lizzie Widdicombe: The Vice Guide to the World : The New Yorker THE WAYWARD PRESS THE BAD-BOY BRAND The Vice guide to the world. by Lizzie Widdicombe APRIL 8, 2013 The Williamsburg headquarters of Vice Media, which calls itself “the Time Warner of the streets.” Its C.E.O., Shane Smith (on phone, above), says, “The over­all goal is to be the largest network for young people in the world.” Photograph by Chris Buck. ate in February, in the Ryugyong Chung Ju­yung LIndoor Stadium, in Pyongyang, North Korea, ten thousand stiff­looking spectators in gray Mao suits gathered to watch a basketball game. Vice Media, the Brooklyn­based company, had arranged to have members of the Harlem Globetrotters—Anthony (Buckets) Blakes, Will (Bull) Bullard, and Alex (Moose) Weekes—play with North Korea’s national team. The company’s cameramen were in the crowd, filming for a weekly news­magazine series, “Vice,” that will air this spring on HBO. Not long before the game started, the crowd, which included the state’s diplomatic and military élite, began to chant “Manse!”—the traditional invocation that means “Ten thousand years, so long live Korea!” The otherworldly roar announced the entrance of www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/04/08/130408fa_fact_widdicombe?printable=true&currentPage=all 1/17 4/8/13 Lizzie Widdicombe: The Vice Guide to the World : The New Yorker North Korea’s Supreme Leader, Kim Jong­un, who succeeded his father in 2011. He sat on a dais, where he was joined by his wife, the former singer Ri Sol­ju, and, a few moments later, an unlikely guest of honor: the onetime Chicago Bulls star and cross­dresser Dennis Rodman. Although almost all foreign media is blacked out in North Korea, basketball is a popular sport, and the country’s ruling family are N.B.A. fanatics. Rodman has a reputation for wild sartorial choices—pink hair, a wedding gown—but he was dressed with relative restraint. He wore a tuxedo jacket, black track pants, wraparound sunglasses, a black sequinned scarf, a black hat that said “USA,” and various lip and nose rings. At each dunk by a Globetrotter or three­pointer by a member of the North Korean team, the crowd erupted in screams. The game ended, as a basketball game cannot, in a tie, 110–110. Afterward, Rodman, with one hand in his pocket, delivered a speech. “First of all,” he said, his words echoing in the immense stadium, “I would like to say thank you. It’s been very good to be here. You guys have been very, very kind to me and to my compadres from America.” He paused as his North Korean translator struggled with “compadres.” Rodman continued, “I’m sorry that my country and your country are not on good terms, but for me and—the country . .” Seeming to lose his train of thought, Rodman turned and bowed in the direction of the Supreme Leader, who had been watching him with a slightly nervous expression. With a flourish of his fingers, Rodman said, “Sir, you have a friend for life.” This cheerful scene—billed as “basketball diplomacy”—was soon complicated by developments in U.S.­North Korean relations. After Rodman’s visit, North Korea, which had recently been hit with tighter U.N. sanctions, scrapped its 1953 armistice with South Korea and threatened a preëmptive nuclear attack on the United States. Last week, Kim said, “The time has come to settle accounts with the U.S. imperialists.” What had seemed like a bold P.R. stunt by Vice now looked like cozying up to a dangerous dictator. This was not helped by a report from Ryan Duffy, a Vice correspondent, on Kim Jong­ un’s hospitality: “Dinner was an epic feast. Felt like about ten courses in total. I’d say the winners were the smoked turkey and sushi, though we had the Pyongyang cold noodles earlier in the trip and that’s been the runaway favorite so far.” Rodman, speaking to reporters in Pyongyang, professed his admiration for the Supreme Leader: “Guess what! I love him.” He added, “The guy’s really awesome.” “I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” a flabbergasted Dan Rather said, on CNN. U.S. News & World Report called the episode “More ‘Jackass’ Than Journalism,” and pointed out that, in light of the regime’s abuses and recent reports of cannibalism among a starving population, “those remarks and current headline on the Vice Web site that ‘North Korea has a friend in Dennis Rodman and Vice’ seem a bit, well, tasteless.” Vice has never been celebrated for good taste. The company started in Montreal, in the mid­ www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/04/08/130408fa_fact_widdicombe?printable=true&currentPage=all 2/17 4/8/13 Lizzie Widdicombe: The Vice Guide to the World : The New Yorker nineties, as a free magazine with a reputation for provocation. Once, after its editors were accused of sexism for featuring nude porn stars in the magazine, they posed nude as well. Current articles combine investigative reporting with a sensibility that is adolescent, male, and proudly boorish. Vice’s most recent issue, the Cultural Atrocities Issue, reads like a combination of National Geographic, High Times, and Penthouse Forum. It includes a photo shoot, titled “Home Entertainment,” of topless women posing with remote controls over their breasts, and a travel piece about the remote Kalash Valleys of Pakistan: “It’s not a nice place to live, but, as I discovered, it is a great place to party.” In recent years, Vice has been engaged in an energetic process of growing up—both commercially and in terms of journalistic ambition. It now has thirty­five offices in eighteen countries, from Poland to Brazil. It operates a record label, which, in 2002, began putting out albums by such of­the­moment bands as Bloc Party and the Raveonettes; book and film divisions (Vice recently helped market the R­rated “Spring Breakers,” directed by Harmony Korine); a suite of Web sites; and an in­house ad agency. These ventures are united by Vice’s ambition to become a kind of global MTV on steroids. According to Shane Smith, Vice’s C.E.O., “The over­all aim, the over­all goal is to be the largest network for young people in the world.” Vice’s most significant move has been from print to video. On its YouTube channel, which has more than a million subscribers, the company has branched into more serious journalistic fare—a recent series was titled “In Saddam’s Shadow: Baghdad 10 Years After the Invasion”— though it still has features like “The Biggest Ass in Brazil” and “Donkey Sex: The Most Bizarre Tradition.” Vice executives sometimes refer to their company as “the Time Warner of the streets,” and in the financial press there is occasional discussion about the price a potential sale might bring. A source familiar with the company’s finances estimates last year’s revenues at a hundred and seventy­five million dollars. In 2011, Vice was valued at two hundred million dollars, and last year Forbes speculated that the company might someday be worth as much as a billion dollars. Not long after Rodman’s trip, I went to see Smith at the company’s headquarters, a set of converted warehouses in Williamsburg. Smith met me in the Bear Room, a conference room decorated with a Persian rug and a grizzly bear, now stuffed, that had been shot after surprising Vice producers filming in Alaska. Smith defended Vice and its reporters against charges of journalistic recklessness. Talking about Kim Jong­un, he said, “Look, the fact that he came is a big deal. The fact that we’re the only people to meet him is a big deal. The fact that we went to his house was a really big deal.” He went on, “Is it journalism? It depends on what the definition of journalism is.” Smith is forty­two and bearish, with a salt­and­pepper beard: he looks like a younger Santa Claus after a tour of duty in Iraq and a stop at a tattoo parlor. The idea for the trip, he said, had www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/04/08/130408fa_fact_widdicombe?printable=true&currentPage=all 3/17 4/8/13 Lizzie Widdicombe: The Vice Guide to the World : The New Yorker come about during the making of a previous Vice documentary in Pyongyang, in 2010. Smith, on a propaganda tour, had seen the basketball, signed by Michael Jordan, that was given to Kim Jong­il by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, in 2000. He realized that sending an N.B.A. star would be the perfect way to get Vice’s cameras back into the closed state. “It was not set up as a stunt,” Smith told Adweek. “Look,” he said, “if I could pull off a stunt where the most hermetic leader of the most hermetic fucking country in the world works with me to do a stunt to promote my TV show, then every TV fucking company in the world should hire me to work for them.” Smith is both Vice’s C.E.O. and its onscreen avatar—as if Jeff Zucker and Wolf Blitzer were one person. Apart from a few years spent bouncing around Eastern Europe, he has had no other career in the two decades since he helped to found Vice. Over the years, he has worked in ad sales and, increasingly, in a managerial and editorial role, which includes starring in the HBO show. He is both garrulous and profane—he often drops F­bombs into a sentence, along with a line from Wordsworth or Yeats.