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We like to think of Vice as the magazine that made it safe to hate again. Around the turn of the millennium, you’ll remember, the streets were filled with vicious hunters of “snark.” Frequently found lining the pages of alternative weeklies, snark is a kind of half-assed satire where the writer appears to be praising his subject, but on closer inspection may be taking a tongue-in-cheek jab or two. Snark stayed and spread because it worked—it allowed writers to feign familiarity with something they’d only just learned about from a press release or an assigning editor.

There’s not a trace of snark in Vice, just simple reasons for liking or hating the subject in question. This is a good approach for covering the big, ugly world we live in, with plenty of stuff deserving of our unbridled hatred and/or enthusiasm.

The magazine has drawn a fair share of hatred in return; everyone (well, most everyone) likes to loudly proclaim their hatred of Vice, trying to convince themselves of it as much as anyone else. Yet everyone reads it. When the magazine appears free on the counter of our local coffeeshop, it disappears faster than hot pizza in a homeless shelter. Though it sometimes inspires comparisons with Rolling Stone, which positioned itself at the tip of the spear of a coherent generational movement, Vice has succeeded in a very different time for a very different reason, by cobbling a dozen small niches together into a single readership.

How, you ask? There are the Dos and Don’ts of course, those tasty bits of ridicule shot through with social commentary. A lot of it is old school meat-and-potatoes editorial work—a consistent voice, a nose for a good story, an ear for the music of language, eyes that actually take an interest in the reality that’s sitting right in front of them, and actual gumshoe get-out-and-work-those-legs reporting. Yes, reporting. This means more than bantering around the office or brainstorming over cocktails or even holding a Creativity Conference. Reporting means packing your bags and actually putting yourself at the edge of your comfort; living on Indian reservations, Katrina refugee camps, in the living rooms and kitchens of Dominican families. This is something Tokion, Vapors, Mass Appeal and all the other street art/skateboarding/graffiti magazines never figured out how to do. Who knows, maybe they were too busy alphabetizing their vinyl doll collections, or maybe they’re just too shy offline. Whatever. Read on, and learn how to keep and hold the world’s flightiest attention spans.

Vulture: It seems like Vice has rediscovered the lost art of editing. Nothing is a word longer than it needs to be. There’s a free play of various styles and topics. You are the editor. What are your secrets?

Jesse Pearson: At the low end of the fun scale, editing is polishing a turd. You take something that came in, something a little boring, and you find some interesting nugget in it and make that the only thing the piece is about. On the high end of the spectrum, editing is taking somebody who’s clearly an accomplished writer and correcting their grammar, which is like no work at all for me.

V: Where do you get story ideas from?

JP: We do a lot of as-told-tos. In those cases, editing can be just transcribing a tape. We like to talk to people who aren’t really writers. Right now we’re doing a Cops Issue. A lot of cops are great guys but they aren’t great writers. They don’t have any experience with it, or they don’t communicate that way. But they’re great storytellers so I’ll just get on the phone with them. I went out to Long Island to meet a couple guys, had coffee with them, taped some of their stories and transcribed it. So that sort of oral history tradition of editing comes into Vice too.

V: Sort of like Studs Terkel.

JP: I like Studs Terkel a lot. A more immediate reference point might be Please Kill Me. Jean Stein and George Plimpton did it in that book Edie. Oral histories are great because a lot of “writer” writers are boring and have a limited scope of experience. People—quote-unquote “real” people as opposed to writers, who might not be real—have better things to tell you. When they’re talking directly to the reader it’s less mediated.

BRUTAL HONESTY IS CLICHÉ

V: Lots of magazines have adopted the theme issue strategy. You guys always seem to manage to come up with material that pushes a given theme’s boundaries or expectations. Once you know what a given issue is going to be about, where do you go looking for good material?

JP: Some of our themes come out of riffing between me and Gavin, one of the magazine’s co-founders. For material, I don’t always go to writers. I’ll go to subjects directly. I’d like to be able to use writers more often because it’d eliminate some work for me, but I can’t afford professional writers—or rather, I don’t want to afford them because it’s kind of a racket. So I guess how I get a good story is the same thing as what we were just talking about. I go directly to the source. When I wanted to get cops stories, I posted on cop message boards and told them exactly who I was and exactly what I was looking for. I got flamed, but then for every ten flames there’d be one guy who’d email me off the board and be like, “I’m interested.” We’d talk, and then we’d meet. It was the same thing with the Natives Issue. Planning that took a good six months. The idea was to go live on a reservation for a week and get stories by the people who live there. It took six months to find the right place. I went out to northwest Montana with our photo editor Patrick, stayed in a motel, met as many people as I could, gained some trust, and recorded their stories. Basically the response to that issue from the people who were in it was really good. I know it might be expected of me to say that, but that really was the most important response, what the subjects had to say. Does that answer your question? You go to real people, not writers.

V: And message boards.

JP: Not so much message boards …

V: But message boards are great for finding real people.

JP: Yeah, because you find really opinionated people and you also find really crazy people.

V: You can throw a query out there and get 45 people to choose from.

JP: The message board thing has worked more for isolated articles than for issues. For the Cops Issue I found an NYPD message board. Before that, we once did a big article on Asperger’s Syndrome. I used message boards to find people with Asperger’s and autism to talk about it. But before that it was just cold calling people, looking in the phone book. For the Natives Issue I needed to find a reservation, so we talked to people we know who are Native American. So I like the Internet, but Google Journalism really grosses me out.

V: What’s Google Journalism?

JP: It’s where you don’t get up from behind your desk, where you just Google. Maybe you do eight degrees of heavy Googling, or even Lexis Nexis. All the sources are secondary, and it becomes an op-ed piece more than anything else. It’s like research masquerading as journalism.

V: It amazes me how often the first reporter will get his facts wrong, but they’ll be pumped into the newswire or the database anyways and get passed around and around.

JP: And then bullshit becomes gospel, basically. So yeah, it’s really important to Vice to get out from inside the office and meet real people and do things and get in there ourselves.

V: How would you characterize the magazine’s voice or editorial center?

JP: I don’t know. I kind of like it to sound like a really smart teenaged girl.

V: A lot of people would say it skews more male, just in terms of the number of boobs per page.

JP: Addressing this is getting kind of tiresome. Some of the attitude or the aggressiveness can be seen as being male, but we’ve got regular staff people who are whatever, a fucking rainbow coalition of colors and sexual preferences and all that crap, you know what I mean? But the voice, we are united by a certain outlook on life or something, and I think our voices are a function of our influences. I know that a few key contributors in addition to myself are equally influenced by the Peoples’ Almanac and Judy Blume.

V: Did you say somewhere that the voice was brutal honesty? Or did I hear that from someone else?

JP: I wouldn’t say “brutal honesty.” That’s pretty gay. I hope I never said that.

V: Oh, okay. But no, that’s what I’d say.

JP: I mean just phrasing it that way seems kind of cliché.

V: It is a cliché, but when you look at the parts of the magazine that really pop, or the parts that seem essential, or “Vice-ey,” whatever the hell that means, they seem very, very honest. Like they’re not showing off but they’re not pulling any punches either. There’s some pitch-perfect balance between those two things that brings to mind the words “brutal honesty.”

JP: I gotcha.

V: It’s not trying to shock you, but it’s not trying to be polite either. It’s right in between.

JP: We aren’t from a journalism background. We didn’t go to school for it. I have no publishing background besides Vice, really—I mean I worked for another magazine besides Vice but I was basically just a drug addict the whole time. I didn’t really do any work.

V: Where was that?

JP: Index. It folded a couple months ago. That was the extent of my publishing background before Vice. So maybe we don’t sound like typical journalism because we’re not versed in the typical journalism school party line. A lot of magazines sound really similar. I don’t know what they teach people in journalism school, but I’m glad I didn’t go there.

V: Are all the various international editions of Vice separate editorial entities, or is there some coordination?

JP: Every global edition uses a large amount of U.S. content because they do the same themes we do, but the global editors are really sharp people too. They go out and find and tailor stories in their home countries. But the mothership is definitely the North American edition.

EMAIL, THE INTERNET, AND OTHER TECHNOLOGICAL CONCERNS

V: What’s your email routine like?

JP: I like IMs. With emails I try to write super short or super long. They’re either one word or one page.

V: Why’s that?

JP: Because it’s either a really stupid question that can be answered in one second or a big issue that I have to address and I’m too lazy to use the phone, so I’ll write these long vacillating emails that don’t really make much sense.

V: What’s your plan for your website?

JP: We’re really global now with editions everywhere—Australia, Japan, Europe—so we amalgamated everything on the website into one big edition so everybody, every editor, every country that has an edition of Vice posts in the same blog section on the lefthand side of the page. When the riots happened in Italy our editor blogged straight from them. If we sponsor a show here in New York we’ll blog about that.

V: What other magazines do you read?

JP: I really like New York magazine lately. The tabloids are great too, like Star. I enjoy reading snooty stuff like Harper’s and the Paris Review and the Economist but they can get really boring too. The Economist is pretty boring but if you can bear to read it, it blows your mind. If you can get through the tone, the stuff they’re talking about is the most important stuff in the world.

V: Well the tone seems designed to carry information in as short and efficient a form as possible.

JP: There’s a really snarky British voice in there too, which I like. In terms of indie magazines, magazine that might be considered our peers, I think they’re all pretty terrible. And I’m not just saying that to be the guy from Vice saying that. I get the same press releases and CDs sent to me that all the other indie hip customized Nike magazines get. I know what they’re doing. They’re writing about the first eight fucking CDs they get in the mail that month. I don’t even pay attention. My assistant opens the CDs. I couldn’t give a shit. If I could cut music from the magazine altogether, I would. Who cares about musicians? They’re the most spoiled babies in the world.

ON MUSIC: IS ANYONE EVEN PAYING ATTENTION?

V: Any bands that have captured your interest right now?

JP: Everyone finds what they need to find. I don’t like the indie flavors of the month. In terms of the magazine, we often do reviews and music features because record labels advertise, so we do our best, and we do bands that we like. I really like doing rap in the magazine because I think that rappers … they just crack me up.

V: Why are all these magazines writing about the same bands?

JP: They’re getting the ads every month, the CDs are coming in every month. It’s easy.

V: Is it a greed thing driven by money? Or a lazy thing driven by inertia? Or more of a crowd/lemming type of thing driven by hype and excitement?

JP: Some of each, I guess. The magazines might want to be caught up in something, excited if they could be a part of a musical movement, like the zine Punk was at one point or like Rolling Stone back when it was a newspaper. So they try to force movements, electroclash and shit like that … the New Weird America thing that has been going on for the past few years, all those bearded guys.

V: Will Vice still have a print edition twenty years from now?

JP: I don’t know. Something about print seems so permanent, and something about the web feels so impermanent. I can’t even look at old issues of Vice because I know it’s there, it’s done, and if I see something I don’t like, I can’t do anything about it. So I never look back at them. The web is so much more ephemeral and fleeting. It’s updated more often. It feels a lot less like you’re bringing a big hammer down on a topic.

V: You never see some guy reading a magazine on a train who gets to page three and reads one sentence that bores him so much he wads the whole magazine up into a ball and throws it across the room. But that’s exactly what happens on the web. If you lose somebody for one second, they’re gone.

JP: I like that magazines last a long time. A magazine sits on the back of your toilet for the entire month that it’s out. By the end of the month, there’s nothing left for you to read but the record reviews, but I like that magazines last like that. We’re also still committed to books at Vice. We’ve got a new books division starting up. There’s nothing more permanent feeling than a book. It’s the furthest you can get from the Internet.

photo by Richard Kern