A Wild Man Grows Up (Just Enough)

SHANE SMITH, a founder of Vice, the streetwise, testosterone-fueled culture and fashion magazine, still chugs canned American beer. He still listens to Bad Brains. And he still favors tattered Vans skateboard shoes and black T-shirts. That much is the same.

It is everything else that has changed. At 40, this former hard-core devotee from Canada now oversees, with his partner, Suroosh Alvi, a mini media empire based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that includes not just the magazine, but also a record label, a book imprint, an online television network and an ad agency, Virtue, with Dell and Nike among its corporate clients.

He owns a loft in TriBeCa, a pub in London, a house for his mom in Palm Springs, Calif., and a mountain (yes, a mountain) in Costa Rica. His idol? No punk rocker, but a Fortune 500 executive.

“I want to be like Tom Freston,” Mr. Smith said, referring to the former chief executive of Viacom, who built MTV Networks for the company. “Tom just flies around everywhere, gets to make movies, gets to start TV shows, hang out with cool people and do whatever he wants.”

The thing is, that’s pretty much what Mr. Smith already does. He is aging gracefully in the role of Vice’s resident wild man. He might present himself as a tattooed hustler — the type of ageless slacker who fires off an e-mail to a reporter with the salutation, “Hey, Cap’n Poopy Pants.” But Vice has grown up, and so has Mr. Smith — sort of.

Once known as a freebie magazine by hipsters for hipsters, handed out at Lower East Side record stores, Vice is now a global brand with a stated circulation of 1.2 million, offices in 30 countries and partnerships with CNN and Intel. Mr. Smith is the star of a new MTV news series, now being taped, to be shown in 2011; it will feature him as an on-air correspondent for Vice reporting from global trouble spots like Yemen. As such, Mr. Smith finds himself in a curious dual role. To hard-partying urban readers, he is a voice of a generation of too-cool D.J.’s and artists who wear rolled selvedge jeans and chunky glasses. But he is also a conduit for corporate America to reach that elusive audience.

It’s a delicate balance for which the director Spike Jonze, a friend and Vice collaborator, thinks Mr. Smith is uniquely suited. He is the embodiment of the gritty Vice ethos, Mr. Jonze said. “But he also happens to be, coincidentally, a really good salesperson, so he can turn around and sell it to the suits.”

Indeed, Mr. Smith is a robust storyteller, the type who wears a few extra pounds as if they’re a trophy from good living. He seems to come by his Falstaffian persona naturally. He grew up in suburban Ottawa, the younger of two sons of parents from Ireland. His father, he said, was an electronics-systems analyst who could light up a room with displays of erudition, wit and, often, bluster.

As a teenager, Mr. Smith started to show his knack for balancing high achievement with high mischief. With his mohawked punk friends, he was happy to raise hell. But when he was alone, he read Solzhenitsyn and Beckett. He attended Carleton University in Ottawa, from which he graduated with honors and a degree in political economy, he said. Later, he hopped around Europe, he said, doing drugs, getting into fights, cooking up schemes — like in the early 1990s, when he worked as an “arbitrageur” in Budapest, peddling currency at youth hostels. “Doctors there were making like $200 a month, and I was making $2,000,” he said.

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Eventually, he moved to Montreal, where he and a childhood friend, Gavin McInnes, teamed with another partner, the more low-key Mr. Alvi, and took over a government-funded community magazine called Voice of Montreal — striking the “o” to create a very different title. (Mr. McInnes, another Vice bad boy, left in 2008.)

At first, Vice was little more than a knock-off of Face, the influential British magazine. But it started finding its voice after 2000, when the staff moved to Williamsburg. There were breast-baring photo spreads by photographers like Richard Kern, and a Vice guide to anal sex. There were louche fashion spreads, but also “Jackass”-style columns like Gross Jar, which chronicled a large jar filled with detritus like used tampons and dead rats.

Eventually, the magazine started to grow a social conscience. During the troop surge in Iraq in 2007, Vice published an issue written by Iraqi citizens — including an account by a woman who had been detained in Abu Ghraib with her son.

Before long, powerful people were clamoring to join the party. Mr. Jonze approached about a collaboration and was named creative director of VBS.tv, an upstart Web division with videos on travel, politics, drugs and sex, often starring Mr. Alvi and Mr. Smith. On air, the shaggy Mr. Smith comes off more like Jack Black than Anderson Cooper, dropping in on hostile places like Darfur, Iran and North Korea, or cavorting nude with a postoperative transsexual hooker in a Bangkok brothel bathtub. It is gonzo journalism for the YouTube generation.

Through Mr. Jonze, he got to know actors like Luke Wilson and Johnny Knoxville. “He’s one of us, not one of them,” said Mr. Knoxville, another over-35 skateboard punk who cultivates his street cred. He is “a decent, sharply intelligent, great big charismatic grizzly bear of a man, and those are the exact qualities you want in a leader, or a drinking buddy.”

Lately, it’s not just cool kids who want in on the action. Kenneth Estenson, the general manager of CNN.com, struck an agreement with Vice to produce video news segments to be streamed on CNN’s site. Despite the fact that Mr. Smith mistook the fresh-faced Mr. Estenson for a junior staff member over lunch at their first meeting, became tipsy and spouted off about the mainstream media, both sides reached a deal, he said. For one much-discussed segment, Mr. Smith traveled to Liberia and profiled a warlord who called himself General Butt Naked, because he fought in the nude. It’s the same approach that Mr. Smith will take with the MTV show, whose name has not been released.

Most recently, Vice partnered with Intel on a Web site called the Creators Project with daylong music and art festivals in London; Beijing; São Paolo, Brazil, and elsewhere. The first event, in New York in June, featured indie bands like Interpol and exhibitions by emerging artists who use high tech to push aesthetic boundaries.

“We have the biggest brands in the world lining up to do something with us,” Mr. Smith said, sounding more executive than grown-up party boy.

Other signs of age are creeping in. In your 40s, he admits, you lose touch with the latest sneakers, especially when trekking off to the Arabian peninsula for work. His beard is streaked with gray. And in June, his wife, Tamyka, gave birth to their first child, Martina. Having a newborn, however, hasn’t drained him of his appetite for fun. Earlier this month, he and Tamyka were out until 11 p.m. on a raucous party boat on the Hudson, where a band called Black Lips was grinding out a concert.

“Dude,” the new father explained, “you have to get a night nanny.”