Vice Magazine: More Than a Hipster Bible?

ON TUESDAY, VICE magazine editor Jesse Pearson will visit class.

Vice magazine started in Montreal in 1994 as a government-funded project. It's now a for-profit, advertising-driven magazine circulated to more than one million people around the world and they have offices in 30 different countries.

The mag has stories from around the globe, about random subjects like fashion, immigration, music, skateboarding, hatred, Iraq and just about anything else. They publish an annual photography issue, and the work of world class photographers like Terry Richardson and Ryan McGinley are in nearly every issue.

Vice is very comfortable with male and female nudity, curse words, sexuality and stuff that isn't politically correct.

"Lenny Kravitz is the biggest fucking twat I've ever met in my life," Pearson said in 2003. "He is arrogant and dumb and boring. He even had a guy carrying the back of his extra-long cardigan like he was a fucking bridesmaid. Joe Strummer was surprisingly cool. Really personable and funny and didn't want anyone to leave. He had time for anybody that wanted to talk to him. He even wrote our DOs and DON'Ts one month."

The New York Times accused Vice of creating "a trailer-park sensibility, embraced with and without irony, that has taken hold among postcollegiate society."

In that same article, Robert Lanham, author of The Hipster Handbook, said, "Of all the magazines that are out there, I think that's the one that nails hipster culture on the head."

What an awful thing to say!

The editor of the UK edition says that Vice isn't just a hipster mag where young people can learn where to find the latest jeans. They are taking a different approach in appealing to the younger audience by doing "serious" work, like documenting drug abuse, prostitution and wars in the Middle East and Africa, among other subjects.

"There are people out there who want to learn," said Andy Capper, Vice's UK editor, "and who don't want to be talked down to."

Vice now has retail stores, an online broadcast outlet, a music label, a pub/ music venue in London and an ad agency attached to the global brand.

Check out Vice's website. What do you think?