Variety: Vice to Launch HBO Nightly News Show in September

Posted August 03, 2016

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Vice is launching a nightly news program on HBO starting in the end of September.  For those who don't know, Vice is a media company that began as a punk magazine in Montreal in the 90s and has turned into a digital media juggernaut that specializes in video.

Through the years, Vice has fully embraced the VJ model.  This nightly program should continue in this vein, and won't resemble the nightly news on more traditional networks like CBS.  If you look at Vice's content, it takes complex stories, often stories not being discussed in the mainstream, and make intimate, powerful arcs.  This kind of video is very successful on the web.

Variety reports:

Vice Media plans to join TV’s nightly news game, and is gearing up to launch a new competitor to Lester Holt, David Muir and Scott Pelley with a program on HBO set to debut on September 26.

“Vice News Tonight” will be a half-hour nightly newscast, and will air weeknights on HBO. It will also be available on the Time Warner premium-cable service’s HBO Go and HBO Now streaming services as well as on demand.  “The nightly news hasn’t changed its format in 60 years, whereas the way most viewers – particularly younger viewers – consume information has changed dramatically,” said Josh Tyrangiel, Vice’s executive vice president of content, news, in a statement. “We understand that people aren’t going to watch ‘Vice News Tonight’ out of obligation. We’re going to have to earn people’s time and attention with great reporting and original forms of storytelling.”

Vice relishes in an image it has created for itself as a brash media upstart built on an empire of newsy video reports with a “you are there” authenticit, distributed primarily via streaming video. By entering nightly news, however, it dips its corporate toe in much deeper waters. A nightly newscast carries with it substantial infrastructure costs and requires nabbing a viewership that is committed to regular tune-in – no small feat in an era when a rising generation of viewers, particularly the sort Vice covets, have a dizzying array of video choices at their beck and call.

Read the full article here.