Vice Media will launch its much-anticipated nightly news show on HBO on September 26, the company said Tuesday. The half-hour program will be called Vice News Tonight, and will also be available through HBO’s digital-only streaming service HBO Now as well as various HBO affiliates.
The nightly news show has been in the works at Vice for more than a year now. It was first announced in March 2015 as part of an expanded partnership with HBO, which included a number of specials that Vice committed to produce for the network, as well as more hours of programming for its existing weekly newsmagazine show, which has been airing on HBO since 2013.
Vice has hired almost 50 reporters, editors, and other staffers over the past few months, from news outlets including MSNBC, the Guardian, the New York Times and Fusion. The new hires include Madeleine Haeringer, an NBC News veteran and former executive producer at MSNBC, who is producing the new show, and former New York Times editor Ryan McCarthy, who is now editor-in-chief of Vice News.
Vice Media founder Shane Smith told Variety earlier this year that he believes there is a “huge white space” in the market for bringing news to a millennial audience.
“We have political contacts and military contacts. We have terrorist contacts. We have contact with everybody,” Smith said. “I think I would put our team up against any other team that’s out there.”
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Vice has been expanding its news and entertainment ambitions as it tries to justify its estimated $4 billion market value, a result of investments from traditional media companies such as A+E Networks—a joint venture between Disney (DIS) and Hearst, which has invested a total of $400 million in the company in a number of funding rounds.
Former Bloomberg Media chief content officer and BusinessWeek editor Josh Tyrangiel was hired in October to run the new Vice news show, and then in May he was given responsibility for all of the company’s news operations. That led to some upheaval in its editorial unit, with about a dozen Vice Media staffers laid off in New York, Los Angeles, and in the United Kingdom.