Visit CNN.com these days and you might come across a video about Liberia in which a regular-looking guy,about as far from a dashing foreign correspondent as you can get,is walking through a swamp and interviewing a Liberian warlord named General Butt Naked. (Hes called that because he leads his fighters wearing nothing more than a bad attitude.) Most of our boys,they would drain the blood from an innocent child and then drink it before going into battle, the general says. So you kill the child and then drink the blood? the reporter,Shane Smith,asks. Yes, says the general. Following a link in the video will lead to a tour of a fetid red-light district and a shot of a young soldier holding a human heart aloft before eating it. But even more surprising than this dark,scary content is finding it on a mainstream media site. The Liberia pieces are supplied through a partnership with VBS.tv,the video arm of Vice,the Brooklyn magazine better known for pictures of young topless women and articles on drug use. None of it is enough to scare away big companies like CNN,Dell and Nike,which have entered into partnerships to capitalise on Vices brand of hipster insouciance. The company has grown to 560 employees in 30 countries,with 2,500 freelancers who are mostly paid in hipster cred. Vice claims a global circulation to a select 1.2 million people in 26 countries,distributed free,but not freely,with a very select audience. Its website,Viceland.com,has 2.1 million unique visitors a month,according to Google Analytics,and its video site has 4.1 million visitors a month. Vice has a seven-year-old music label with sales of two million albums in the US,including music by the Streets,Death From Above,and the Stills. Its in-house ad agency,Virtue (get it?) has dozens of clients,including Red Bull and Vodafone. The company has produced 10 books and four feature films as well. We are not on the outside anymore. For the longest time,we have been in the periphery,we couldnt get the meetings,but now I like to say that we are perfectly positioned, Smith,one of the companys founders,said. The magazine,created by welfare scammers in 1994 in Montreal before moving to New York in 1999,started as a thinking mans lad magazineco-founder Suroosh Alvi once said Vice did stupid in a smart way,and smart in a stupid way. They have an unvarnished way of telling stories, said K.C. Estenson,general manager of CNN.com. A 12-minute report now showing on the website features Smith,who bribed his way into North Korea and surreptitiously made a 14-part documentary there. Other videos include quality time in Pakistani gun markets,a stroll with Liberian warlords,and a piece about hunting radioactively contaminated boars with machine guns at the site of the Chernobyl disaster. We are building out the next MTV, Smith said.
