More than three months after Vice Media Group CEO Bruce Dixon announced plans to lay off hundreds of employees and shut down the flagship site, co-founder Shane Smith is set to return as editor-in-chief of Vice News and host a podcast with Bill Maher this summer .
Smith, who was a co-founder Vice (as it was then called Voice of Montreal) in 1994, stepped down as CEO in 2018 as digital publishing fell into the background. When discussing his decision to return, he told Wall Street Journal: “It is your baby that you made, that you gave birth to.”
The show, Vice News: The truth?will air on the Maher Club podcast network Random Studio and Vice TV, with Smith slated to host and Maher to join as a recurring guest, according to the WSJ, which also reported that Smith will have no management responsibilities but his company title.
The series is expected to debut ahead of the presidential election. “We hope to uncover the truth and sheer madness of the year's major political events. Where history takes us, we will follow. Looks like we'll be looking into it though. Whatever the truth, it promises to be the opposite of boring,” Smith said in a statement released Wednesday.
Maher added that producing the upcoming Vice show was a “career highlight” and, echoing Smith, said he's “excited to have the band back together with Shane for a podcast about looking at something that both of us very interested. fact finding'.
Looking back at Vice's tumultuous history, like the 2017 New York Times report on allegations of sexual harassment within the company, Smith was quoted as saying WSJ that he had few regrets. “Obviously you can go back and say, I would be much more of an 'HR lens' in my workplace,” he said, adding, “Happiness is the future.”
Vice, which was once valued at $5.7 billion in 2017, filed bankruptcy in May. At that time, NYT said multimillion-dollar investments from companies such as buyout firm TPG and Disney and the buyout were rendered worthless by the bankruptcy.
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