On Nancy Dubuc’s first day as the new CEO of Vice Media, she sent out an all-staff email to introduce herself. She praised the youthful but unwieldy institution’s history of “fearless” content; clarified the pronunciation of her last name (“Dubuque”); and outlined her core values: details, accountability, trust, teamwork, colleagueship, and respect. Amid reports of the company’s questionable HR practices, sexual harassment allegations, and major revenue misses, Dubuc had a massive challenge set before her. The letter was designed to signal just how confidently she could walk the tightrope between Vice’s unconventional creative values and a fastidious, buttoned-up new way of operating. “The seemingly mind-numbing ‘corporate’ nuts-and-bolts things that send some people’s eyes rolling? I love that stuff and place a lot of significance on it,” she wrote. “Of course, I have to single out [cofounders] Shane [Smith] and Suroosh [Alvi] for what they created: this punky upstart that has become a global giant through passion and sheer force of will.”
Dubuc will need to juggle plenty of nuts and bolts in her new role at Vice, now a company of 3,000 employees, with 39 offices globally, including New York, L.A., and London. Vice’s offerings span a dizzying array of platforms: In addition to its many online news and culture sites, the company cranks out a suite of docu-style video series on its cable TV channel, Viceland, as well as nightly and weekly Vice News shows in partnership with HBO. It has a film studio and a creative services and advertising agency, and covers topics ranging from food and drink (Munchies, Beerland) to national news like the opioid epidemic (Dopesick Nation). The company seems to have its hand in every cookie jar, but if you ask audiences to characterize Vice, they might struggle to articulate its identity with a single hallmark show or website. Dubuc hinted lightly at this identity crisis in her introductory letter: “I question processes in order to strengthen them.… We must be a cohesive and collaborative team across all of the individual businesses in the company,” she wrote.
But what really stood out about the letter was not its content—it was Dubuc’s font choice. The email had been typed in Comic Sans, a move that sent a wave of titters through her staff of famously cooler-than-thou millennials. By now, “it’s such a Vice anecdote,” one employee told me. “Comic Sans is just so uncool, and for someone to do that…well, you know.”
Over three months later, in September, Dubuc remembers the incident with an attitude of self-awareness and resilience. She invokes the story herself and offers to forward me the email, probably sensing that if she doesn’t, someone else at the company will—it is, of course, an institution made up of chatty journalists, which gives her pause. (“It’s different for me to run an organization that has journalists in it. Look guys, this is not Vice on Vice,” she says, a bit exasperated.) “I stupidly was trying to be casual, but apparently it had some subtext,” she tells me, half grimacing and half smiling. We’re sitting at a picnic table on a solar-powered patio outside Vice’s hipster-chic headquarters in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where twentysomethings are milling around with their made-to-order Sweetgreen salads. “I guess it was too casual,” she adds. If Dubuc, a 50-year-old Upper East Side resident, mother of two, and former CEO of A+E Networks, was trying not to stick out like a sore thumb, the email kerfuffle certainly didn’t help.
On the other hand, Vice’s employees had been through enough turbulence in recent years that they could handle a quirky typeface. By this point, Vice’s bumpy trajectory has been well documented: The company began in 1994 as a scrappy magazine led by a group of Canadian punks, who cultivated a loyal following with their bold and sometimes proudly crass approach to youth culture. Over the next two decades, Vice transformed from a tiny, swashbuckling curio to a global media empire, complete with a $5.7 billion valuation and an army of excitable investors willing to bet big on the brand. When old-money media execs thought of the future of—and the lucrative possibilities associated with—the millennial zeitgeist, they thought of Vice and its renegade overlord, Shane Smith, a guy notorious for reportedly dropping $300,000 on a steak dinner and $23 million on the house from Entourage. As the company expanded, it managed to retain its hard-partying culture and its bad-boy ethos—which was the problem. After scattered reports of unsavory workplace behavior (plus myriad complaints about low pay and chaos within the business), the New York Times published a story in December 2017 detailing a pattern of sexual harassment by male higher-ups and a less-than-supportive response from human resources. To compound the company’s troubles, the Wall Street Journal released a report last February revealing that Vice had fallen short of its 2017 revenue target of $805 million by more than $100 million. New York magazine later published a feature claiming the company had been “built on a bluff.”
Getty ImagesStephanie Keith
Throughout this tumultuous period, Dubuc, who’d invested in Vice Media as an A+E exec, sat on its board of directors. (A+E Networks is a joint venture of DisneyABC Television Group and Hearst Communications, Inc., the publisher of ELLE.) Smith repeatedly joked that she should take the reins. Dubuc didn’t take him seriously—until mid-2018, when Vice seemed on the cusp of implosion. She was a sensible choice: a major-media executive with a proven track record, someone intimately familiar with Vice’s strengths and failures, and, most importantly, a woman. A woman hired to mop up the mess of a 49-year-old who’d leveraged his Peter Pan syndrome into a multibillion-dollar operation. So the font thing was an embarrassment, but a surmountable one. When Dubuc got wind that her staff was whispering about the email, she kept it in her back pocket, only to wield it in the all-staff update she sent on her one hundredth day. Before introducing a slate of impressive new hires, she wrote, “I am invigorated by the passion that pulses through our walls. I’m even more excited now than when I sent out that first email.” Some of the text was written in Comic Sans, a wink to signal that, even if she was older and a bit out of touch with the communication customs of her employees, at least she was in on the joke.
It’s sometimes said that Vice has long been in need of an “adult in the room.” “That annoys me,” Dubuc says when I use the expression. “I’m not the oldest person. And I think it’s insulting, frankly, to everybody else. It belittles everything that they’ve accomplished.” Tall and deep-voiced, Dubuc speaks with a deliberate authority that telegraphs just how much experience she has speaking at board meetings and on panels (like most CEOs, she’s had the benefit of executive coaching throughout her career). But she can’t be described as someone whose edges have been sanded down by the forces of corporate culture. She isn’t afraid to roll her eyes when something—like the expression “adult in the room”—rubs her the wrong way. But even if Dubuc is loath to label herself the grownup, the contrast between her and Smith is striking. Smith was known for stoking investor interest by making bold—even reckless—statements about Vice’s future. Dubuc’s style is more measured. Smith would speak in broad strokes, claiming that Vice was, point-blank, “the number one new media company in the world.” Dubuc delves into the “unsexy” nitty-gritty. Smith cultivated a freewheeling social atmosphere that blurred the lines between work and play. Dubuc is more likely to run into her employees at the Williamsburg SoulCycle than at a local bar. Smith is still at the company, but in a diminished role. With the title of executive chairman, he’s spearheading some TV initiatives, keeping his on-air role with Vice, and continuing to attend big pitch meetings with prospective business partners. [After multiple requests, Smith was not made available for comment for this article.]
At first, Dubuc handled Smith’s legacy with kid gloves: “I was more worried, like, you know…it is Shane’s vision and his baby. Can I embody that?” she remembers. “What I have to get over is that I’m not Shane, and Shane’s not me.” But several months into her new role, Dubuc has taken full control. At a DealBook conference in early November, she said that Smith’s presence had been overstated in the Vice narrative: “A lot of the audience doesn’t know what Shane looks like or who Shane is,” she said, later adding, “I run the show.” Dubuc is now the public face of the company, appearing on the cover of the Hollywood Reporter and doing the panel circuit. Dubuc is working to instill trust internally. Smith was famously absent from the company’s day-to-day operations. Some employees claimed they’d rarely seen him in the flesh. He preferred to barrel into view, intermittently, via video broadcasts. “The place has been a ghost ship for three years,” one employee told me. Dubuc has made a point of being available, hosting regular town-hall meetings in which all local staff members are invited to ask questions and air any grievances. These gatherings have been contentious and uncomfortable, according to multiple Vice employees. “The picture of Vice that’s been painted [to Dubuc] is very different than the Vice that people making $45K see, and I don’t know that she was fully prepared for the level of frustration that exists among actual workers,” says one employee involved in union organizing efforts. “I think you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone here who’s operating without at least a plan B.” Still, several employees expressed to me their relief that she has been present in the building and available for conversation. She may be sending emails in Comic Sans, but at least she’s sending emails.
Dubuc was raised in a middle-class family in Rhode Island, and after attending Boston University, she worked her way through television and media not by the conventional MBA route, but through assistantships and department hopping at various companies. She eventually joined the History channel as the director of historical programming and worked her way up the ranks of A+E Networks (the parent company of History, A&E, and Lifetime). Under her watch, A+E was able to transform itself by introducing content that appealed to Middle America: Down-home reality shows like Pawn Stars, Ice Road Truckers, and Duck Dynasty exploded in popularity, and Dubuc was labeled by Bloomberg Businessweek in 2013 as “the show picker with the hottest hand in cable television.”
But when I raise this with Dubuc, she’s quick to reject this sweeping assessment of her role. “I just want to be careful. By the time Duck Dynasty came in, I was already CEO. I didn’t say, ‘Green-light this show,’ ” she remembers. “I would never want to take credit from the development executive, Elaine [Frontain Bryant], who brought it in. Another woman,” she adds. “A man would take credit. I’m not going to take credit.”
At the start of last year, Dubuc was content in her role at A+E, but perhaps a little too comfortable as she headed into contract negotiations. According to Howard Owens, the former president of National Geographic Channels who pitched Dubuc shows at A+E for years, Dubuc’s choice to go to Vice was not obvious. “She had so many options. She could have done a lot and picked anything,” he says. During the fraught period when Smith was encouraging Dubuc to take his role, she and her husband of 21 years, Michael Kizilbash, talked over the prospect obsessively. “Never before have Nancy and I discussed something so unflinchingly and repeatedly,” he says. “Not even the topic of whether or not to have kids.” He continues, “It was tough. She knew very few of the players, and it is daunting to take a step into the unknown.”
Ultimately, it was the allure of the unknown that won out. “You can’t be a media executive, never mind a female executive, and not be asking yourself some pretty significant questions,” she says. “It was really about recognizing that I had the power to change my own story and my own narrative and what I wanted to do. Here I am, sitting in my office every day, staring at this sign that says, ‘Who Dares, Wins,’ and I felt I wasn’t daring anymore.” To take the reins at Vice would be nothing if not daring.
Three weeks after our initial meeting, Dubuc gets onstage at an advertising conference in Midtown with a female Hulu executive. They’re here to discuss Gen Z, the massive and elusive generation of young people set to dethrone millennials as the most important demographic to advertisers. Dubuc is suffering from a cold, but she appears more comfortable among corporate-media bigwigs than with bespectacled and tattooed TV producers and writers. In a pastel-pink blazer, a pair of khakis, and bright pink loafers, she controls the conversation with ease and humor. When asked about the proclivities of today’s teenagers, she resists defaulting to the groans of despair that generally accompany any mention of screen-addled young people. The moderator references an oft-cited factoid that “one-third of Gen Z thinks the [world] is flat,” and Dubuc scoffs. “I think this might be fake news circulating. Is that really true?” she asks. “Look, what gives me hope is, when Elvis Presley gyrated his hips onstage, we had a meltdown as a country that the world is coming to an end, rock ’n’ roll is going to be the death of us all.… Every generation has had the same sequence of events and the same process.”
At lunch after the panel, Dubuc seems a bit surprised by the pace of her new life at Vice. She’d quarantined herself at home the day before but found that the meetings were ceaseless. “A big adjustment is that everyone at Vice is used to always being on video chats,” she says through a stuffed nose. “Working from home doesn’t mean you’re taking a call once in a while. You’re on.” The biggest difference between Vice and A+E, she says, is the speed. “There’s no dead time. None,” she says. “And I have to work on weekends now—I mean, really work.”
Getty ImagesMichael Kovac
Dubuc has plenty to tackle: She will focus on unifying the company, which had, in its prolonged state of breakneck-pace growth, become disjointed. (It is not uncommon for a Vice employee in one department to begin researching a project, only to find that it is already being handled by another department.) She is trying to fill up airtime on Vice’s television channel with high-quality content; later this year, she will introduce a two-hour nightly live broadcast in place of the former talk show hosted by Desus and Mero, whose departure to Showtime marked a major loss for the brand. (“They’re going to a platform that their audience doesn’t pay for,” she tells me. “I told them, ‘You can always come back.’ ”) She will have to decide the future of Vice’s programs on HBO; Vice News Tonight‘s contract runs through late 2019, though there are internal rumors that the program might merge with Vice’s weekly series, Vice on HBO, earlier in the year. Dubuc will continue to develop content, and weigh in on Vice’s editorial decisions, without “un-Vicing Vice,” she says. Last year, she argued with staff about whether to cover Meghan Markle. “I was actually like, ‘Guys, this is a black princess! You have permission to do her!’ ” Ultimately, the staff resisted. Still, Dubuc will not be precious about the content generated, so long as there is the potential for an audience. I ask if she’s willing to green-light a farfetched, decidedly un-Vice idea—say, a cheesy but alluring reality show—and she doesn’t skip a beat: “Absolutely.”
In addition to content growth, there will also be vast cost-cutting. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, Dubuc instituted a hiring freeze this fall that, along with natural attrition, could shrink Vice’s workforce by as much as 15 percent. During a November board meeting, Dubuc outlined plans to shift focus to more promising areas, like Virtue (Vice’s in-house advertising agency) and TV shows and films for third parties. She’s reportedly planning to fold the company’s more than 12 online verticals into between three and five verticals.
Dubuc will continue to work on the cultural issues within Vice and address its gender pay inequity. (She’s hired Proskauer Rose LLP to help with this problem.) She’ll also focus on decidedly unglamorous tasks, like coming up with multiplatform advertising campaigns. She has poached a group of flashy-seeming higher-ups from other companies to report to her. “All the guys are leaving, which is what I like best,” one female employee told me. “She came in, and she cleaned house.”
Because Smith remains at the company, Dubuc still has to grapple with his voice and his vision. A few weeks after the Emmy Awards in September, it was Smith who sent a company-wide email to congratulate the staff on their wins. In a meandering, slightly unhinged email that felt more like the past than the future, he wrote, “We are the most important youth media company in the world today.… We are the bellwether.”
Perhaps most crucially, Dubuc has been working to cultivate confidence among partners and investors in the aftermath of reports of Vice’s shaky revenue numbers. When I ask how the mood of investors has been since she started, she is quick to say that she senses a newfound optimism. “I feel a lot of encouragement, now that we’ve found our way through to the other side. We took some big steps early,” she says. I ask her what those big steps were. “Well,” she says, and takes a long pause. “Hiring me was a big step. Shane is fully and unequivocally letting me run the day-to-day.” At one point, Dubuc pulls out her phone and slips on her glasses. “I have to show you something hilarious,” she says, and opens her text messages. She explains a growing phenomenon wherein kids are thrust onto playgrounds deemed “risky” in an effort to stoke their sense of adventure. “I actually kind of believe in this. It’s a whole thing, dangerous playgrounds,” she says. But her sister-in-law had sent her an example that went beyond the pale. Dubuc plays me a nerve-shredding video of tiny children aggressively jumping from chair to chair without touching the ground. “I watched it over and over again. I was like, What the fuck is this?” she says, aghast. She studies it again and returns with a new assessment. “I’m not sure that’s related to the dangerous-playground thing,” she says, “so much as it was the teacher not paying attention.”
State of Affairs
– 8 months since Dubuc took over as CEO
– 5.7B Vice’s company valuation.
– 27M monthly visitors to Vice Digital’s websites
– 30 average age of the company’s 3,000 employees
– 37% of Vice’s audience is from Generation Z, people born after the mid-1990s.
– 68M homes in the United States have the Viceland television channel.
This article originally appeared in the January 2019 issue of ELLE.
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