More than three months after Vice Media Group CEO Bruce Dixon announced plans to layoff hundreds of employees and the shuttering of its flagship website, co-founder Shane Smith is set to return as editor-in-chief of Vice News and to host a podcast with Bill Maher this summer.
Smith, who co-founded Vice (which at the time was called Voice of Montreal) in 1994, stepped down as CEO in 2018 as the digital publication floundered behind the scenes. When discussing his decision to come back, he told the Wall Street Journal: “It’s your baby that you built, that you birthed.”
The show, Vice News: The Truth?, will be featured on Maher’s podcast network Club Random Studio and Vice TV, with Smith slated to host and Maher set to join as a recurring guest, according to WSJ, which also reported that Smith will have no management responsibility despite his company title.
The series is expected to debut ahead of the presidential election. “We hope to uncover the truth and sheer bull-goose lunacy of the main political events of the year. Wherever the story takes us, we will follow; however nuts it seems we will investigate; whatever the truth is, 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 that he was “thrilled to be getting the band back together with Shane for a podcast about examining something that we both care deeply about; the search for facts.”
When looking back at Vice’s turbulent history, such as the the 2017 New York Times report on sexual harassment allegations within the company, Smith reportedly told WSJ that he had few regrets.
“Obviously you can go back and say, I would have been a lot more ‘HR-lens’ in my workplace,” he said, adding, “Happiness is the future.”
Vice, which was once valued at $5.7 billion in 2017, filed for bankruptcy in May, 2023. At the time, NYT reported that multimillion investments from companies like buyout firm TPG and Disney and buyout were rendered worthless by the bankruptcy.
