Vice is dead. Long live Vice.

The bad guys keep winning but they can't take away our spirit.

I remember I was staying at my parents house because I had just been fired from only my third newspaper job for being too pushy about wanting to cover hard news and none of the soft stuff, and I was on the phone with an editor at Vice named Harry Cheadle. We were talking about a story I was writing about a friend of a friend who was volunteering his time to help gang members remove their tattoos as they tried to start new lives. It was a perfect Vice story and it was my first one so I was very excited. I told Harry that I wasn’t going to finish it that day because things had gotten a little crazy back in Peoria — the cops had raided a house where some friends lived because one of them had been running a Twitter account that made fun of the mayor.

What? Harry said, and so I told him what little I knew. He told me to forget about the tattoo removal story for now and write up everything I could about what became known as Twittergate. I covered the saga for the next few months for Vice in addition to writing other stories. Then Ferguson happened and I was on the phone with another Vice editor named Matt Taylor while I flew down the highway from one riot zone to another as the city exploded in rage. Eventually, I wrote a story I wrote about being trapped in a Ferguson bar with a bunch of rednecks who were loading assault rifles while protesters burned the city around us. Vice was the perfect home for these types of stories back then and now it’s dead. When I say “long live Vice,” I guess I mean the idea of Vice, because apparently they’re going to kill the whole website and all those stories will be gone, plus many more. 

The downfall of Vice isn’t as detrimental to upholding democracy as, say, the shuttering of the New York Times or the Washington Post would be. Mostly it’s a huge bummer, because Vice was a place where huge swaths of the population — especially young people — could go to read about the stuff that they thought was interesting. It was also a place where people like me could write about something like a mayor in the Midwest raiding some line cook’s home over a Twitter account and instead of writing a sentence like, “legal experts say the mayor’s actions prompt complex questions about libel law,” which is what you’d have to do if you wrote the story of Twittergate for a place like the Times or the Post, I could simply write that the mayor was a power-mad thug with skin thinner a sheet of newsprint. In other words, I could simply write what any reasonable person looking at the facts of the case would have thought.