Vice

About 75 percent of the company belongs to Vice Media Inc. senior management, including CEO and figurehead for the company Shane Smith. Other notable shareholders include Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox (5 percent stake), and A&E, a joint venture of Disney and Hearst, which spent $250 million for a 10 percent stake.

Vice doesn’t disclose its finances publicly. Valued between $4.2 billion and $4.5 billion, Vice is projected to have accumulated revenue of nearly $1 billion by the end of 2015. A year before it was valued at $2.5 billion. The first quarter of 2015 brought the company $545 million revenue. Vice’s income swelled after inking a number of lucrative multiyear deals, including with the likes of HBO, A&E Networks, and Canadian media conglomerate Rogers Communications.

Vice was founded in 1994 in Montreal, by Smith, Suroosh Alvi and Gavin McInnes as the magazine Voice of Montreal and renamed Vice in 1996. The print edition originally focused on youth culture, it has grown into a multimedia company with a TV and film production studio, record label, a book publishing division, and several international digital channels. By 2013, it had 34 bureaus worldwide after launching a full-fledged news division. In November 2015, Vice and entertainment cable channel A&E (owned by Hearst and Disney) announced a joint venture in which current offering H2 ‒ an extension of the History Channel ‒ will be relaunched as a 24-hour-news network to take on the mainstream media. Vice also has a four-year contract with HBO to produce a five-day-a-week newscast on the premium cable network.

Vice News is known for investigative and documentary journalism as well as shock stunts, exploitative material, and brand-sponsored content. Its goals are to "provide an unvarnished look at some of the most important events of our time, highlight under-reported stories from around the globe, and get to the heart of the matter with reporters who call it like they see it." Praise for the $2.5 billion media empire has been effusive, with Adweek declaring: "Vice has found that magical point of convergence where good journalism, positive cash flow and (most elusive of all) the millennial attention span meet."

Other notable channels are the Creators Project (arts and creativity), Motherboard (technology), Fightland (martial arts) and Broadly (women).

The company claims 200 million unique visitors each month through its 500 publishing channels.

Smith’s ability to parlay access into a media empire has made him a wealthy man. His net worth in 2013 was estimated at $400 million, according to Forbes. He insists that corporate funding for Vice does not influence the content it produces, but gives it freedom to do what it wants.

In a 2007 Playboy interview, Smith claimed to have covered the Bosnian War in the 1990s for Reuters and the Budapest Sun. However, neither organization has any record of Smith ever working for them, according to investigative reporter Charles C. Johnson, who says that records of Smith’s journalism work appear only after 2004.

Smith was the "sales guy, the marketing guy," Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes told the Hollywood Reporter in May 2015. "I was the editor. I did all the editing. I controlled the content... [Vice] was 100 percent my baby." McInnes sold all his shares in the company in 2008 and signed a strict no-compete agreement, officially claiming "creative differences" with Smith and the rest of the team.

Miller has worked for Vice since 2009, becoming editor-in-chief of the VICE UK bureau in 2012.He has also reported from the likes of Venezuela and Greece for documentaries aired on the company’s Vice News channel. In February 2015, Miller was named Vice Media’s global head of content.

Vice’s influence over the coveted 18-to-34 demographic has drawn much criticism from other media, along with accusations of shilling for corporate sponsors and even the government while adopting a snide, subversive, counter-culture pose.

"[Vice’s] success is based on the neat trick of luring in cool young people with the promise of don’t-give-a-f**k edginess, and then selling those young people’s coolness to Intel, or Absolut, or any other large corporation that needs to buy that sort of coolness," wrote Gawker contributor Hamilton Nolan, who appears to have something of an obsession with Vice. In another Gawker piece, Nolan called Vice "an ever-expanding machine for selling counterculture cool to the world’s largest and most mainstream corporations."

Judging by Vice’s response to Nolan’s articles, the dislike between the two media empires appears to be mutual.

Vice has also faced criticism over its all-access documentary series on the jihadist group Islamic State (IS, also known as ISIL or ISIS) in August 2014, and a stunt in which former NBA star Dennis Rodman traveled to North Korea with a Vice crew in tow, to meet with Kim Jong-un. The "basketball diplomacy" was widely panned as a stunt.

A story about the NFL written by freelancer Michael Tracey in September 2014 apparently got one Vice editor in hot water with his bosses. Charles Davis was berated by his chiefs and told that Tracey’s article could jeopardize Vice’s access to the NFL. After two months working at Vice’s Los Angeles bureau, Davis’s position was eliminated by the company’s global head of content, Alex Miller.

In March 2015, the White House gave Vice exclusive access to President Barack Obama during a trip to Georgia. Shane Smith served as a moderator for Obama’s round-table with high-school and college students. Even pro-Obama commenters said Smith’s interview with the president looked like a "party promotional video."

In July 2015, Obama teamed up with Vice again for a first-ever presidential visit to a federal prison. Vice incorporated the visit into a TV special called ‘Fixing the System’, which aired in September. Washington Post TV critic Hank Stuever described the special as "dull" and "essentially a photo op" that did not contribute much news or insight.