“Cool culture, by definition, is small”: VICE web strategy with redesign

VICE’s new news site launched this weekend with responsive features and big bold images, as was previewed by Eddy Moretti, VICE Media‘s Creative Director.

Web strategy from the Brooklyn-based media outlet were shared at this past Wednesday’s Future State of Entertainment talk at the IFP Made in NY Media Center. Visit Vice’s YouTube page.

Marc Shiller, CEO of BOND Strategy and Influence, hosted the Q&A, as he has the previous three events in the series. The two discussed the future of news while sharing a bottle of wine and fielding questions from the audience of several dozen people.

• “Cool culture, by definition, is small,” Moretti said. While cool is all about knowing about something little known, Moretti described a world in which the desire to find the next cool thing connects young people globally.
• He said that the idea of digital delivery was written into the DNA of the company from the start. While it began as a Canadian newspaper, the idea was always to go multichannel. Now that it’s here, he said, “We are looking to up our game in terms of digital delivery.”
• If anyone is VICE‘s competition, it’s MTV, but Moretti described their model as pushing American cool on everyone else while his company’s is to find the cool in every part of the globe and highlight them.
• Piracy, he said, is not an issue at this point, as they have primarily been giving content away, selling ads and striking deals with brands. He did say that they will be moving toward finding more ways for people to pay for content.
• The company’s editors at desks around the world are on the phone with each other a lot, figuring out what stories from other sites are trending and should be republished and, sometimes, translated on other VICE channels around the world.
• Moretti was frank that he didn’t think VICE was as good with its data as some other media brands that really fixate on it, describing the company’s content strategy as “weird people exploring their passions,” but he said the company is working on it. For example, editors worldwide all have a dashboard of how all VICE content is performing, in order to make decisions about what to republish where.

In the Q&A that followed, one person asked about the standards as journalism moved online. Moretti said that fact checking was important to the site but that it also viewed the idea of journalistic objectivity as a false ideal.

VICE employs 325 people in the United States and 1,500 globally.