Vice Media announced today that it will be partnering with “American Idol” producer FreemantleMedia to launch a yet-unnamed food vertical in early April.
The new site will be the first food-centric project for the hip digital media giant and will launch as a Web channel that will sell its original content to TV networks globally. The Vice food vertical will comprise a mix of video, articles, recipes and events. Subjects will include the politics of food, world travel and cuisine, and an “irreverent” look at home cooking.
The promised Vice “signature perspective,” of course, has been the subject of praise, ridicule and complaints for its outlandish, irreverent and often aggressively cool content. Like it or not, news of the food vertical is just the tip of what you can expect from Vice’s expansion in the coming months: Co-founder and CEO Shane Smith told the Wall Street Journal in November that the company has hired more than 60 reporters and editors in the past couple of months, to cover everything from the Middle East to health-care reform, and to expand the media venture’s digital-video offerings.
Still, with features like “The Motorcycle Gang Girls of Morocco” and “Balloon Porn Superstar,” it’s hard not to poke some gentle fun at Vice. And with that in mind, here are 12 food headlines we’d like to see starting in April. Feel free to send some of your own to us at @Digiday:
- We Ate the World’s Hottest Chile While Padma Lakshmi Gave Us a Yak’s Milk Bath in the Annapurna Foothills
- Cooking With Bodily Fluids
- Meet the Only Noodle Place in Laos Run by Ladyboy MMA Fighters
- We Went to an Underground Sushi Bar in Kyoto Where Monks Eat Live Sharks
- We Lost a Bet With Michael Pollan and Had to Eat Industrial Pig Slop
- Forget Cronuts and Ramen Burgers. Try Foie Grog: Liver-Infused Beer from Bretagne
- The Only Roadkill Armadillo Recipe You’ll Ever Need
- Reading Alice Waters Fanfic with Ruth Reichl
- We Spoke to Three Gay Imams About Finding Love and Halal Hoagies in Queens
- Meet the Organic Horticulturalist Who Grows the Most Hallucinogenic Kale in Santa Cruz
- “I Still Can’t Believe He Fit The Whole Eggplant in There”
- Meet the Cured Meat that Also Cures Chlamydia
More in Media
‘JG believed that even in a demanding industry, it was possible to lead with both rigor and humanity’
The industry pays respects to OpenX CEO John Gentry, who sadly passed away last week.
The Rundown: Google has drawn its AI payment lines — and publishers’ leverage is narrow
For publishers trying to navigate AI licensing, the message was blunt: Google is willing to pay for access, but not for training – and it remains unwilling to define AI Overviews as a compensable use of journalism.
Media Briefing: Google’s latest core update a reminder that pageviews can’t remain the primary metric
Google’s latest core update signals pageviews can no longer be the primary metric, favoring intent-solving publishers over scale.