In 2023 Flaunt Magazine ran a piece on NFT marketing strategy that quoted Joey Sendz at length. The pitch that landed it did not mention a company, a funding round, or a product. It described a specific thing that was happening in a specific scene, and it offered someone who could explain why it was happening. The brand came along for the ride.
That is the whole method, and it is why most attempts to pitch Vice fail on the first line.
Vice does not run announcements. It runs worlds. An editor there is looking for a subculture, a tension, a person doing something that does not make obvious sense, and a writer who can get close enough to it to come back with detail. If your email leads with what your company does, you have already told them there is no story.
Here is how to pitch Vice in a way that survives the first ten seconds, and the five angles that still get commissioned.
Read Who Actually Writes There
Before writing a word of your pitch, spend forty minutes on bylines.
Vice runs heavily on freelancers. That is the single most important operational fact about pitching it, and almost nobody acts on it. A staff editor is managing a queue and protecting their time. A freelancer is hunting for the next commission and will do the internal selling for you if your idea is good enough to pay their rent.
So your target list is not an editor. It is three to five freelancers who have published something adjacent to your territory in the last six months. Find them in the bylines, find them on social, read two of their pieces properly, and notice what they keep circling back to. Writers have obsessions. A pitch that feeds an existing obsession converts at a completely different rate than a cold one.
When you do pitch an editor directly, pitch the section rather than the masthead. Vice’s verticals operate with real independence, and a tech editor and a culture editor want structurally different things from the same raw material.
Lead With the World, Not the Client
The opening line decides everything, and the instinct to establish credibility first is what kills it.
A pitch that opens with “I represent a company that has built the first platform for X” has told the editor that the story is a product. A pitch that opens with “There is a group of twenty-somethings in Phoenix who have turned press coverage into a sport, and they are gaming it in a way that is about to become a problem” has told the editor there is a world. The second one might be about exactly the same company.
Write three sentences before you write the pitch. The first names who the people are. The second names what is strange about what they are doing. The third names why now rather than last year. If you cannot write the third sentence honestly, you do not have a Vice pitch, you have a profile request.
The client appears after that, as a source, a protagonist, or a piece of evidence. One sentence, maximum, and it should read as useful access rather than as the point of the email.
Offer Access Nobody Else Has
Access is the currency, and it is the thing most pitches forget to put on the table.
Editors commission stories they believe can actually be reported. An angle with no door into it is a nice idea that dies in the planning meeting. So your pitch needs to answer the reporting question before it gets asked: who can the writer talk to, what can they see, and what can they get that a competing outlet cannot.
Concrete access looks like named people who have already agreed to speak, internal data you are willing to share on the record, a physical place the writer can visit, or a document that has not been published. Vague access looks like “our team is available for interview,” which every pitch in the inbox also says.
There is a version of this that works even when you have no dramatic access at all, and it is underused. Offer to be the explainer rather than the subject. A writer reporting on a scene needs someone who can tell them how the money moves, who the players are, and which of the obvious explanations is wrong. That person often does not appear in the finished piece by name, and the ones who do it well get called again on every subsequent story in that territory. Being the permanently useful background source is a slower play than being profiled, and it compounds in a way a single feature never does.
If the only access you have is an executive who wants to talk about their vision, you are competing against pitches that offer a basement in Detroit and a spreadsheet. You will lose.
Five Angles That Still Get Commissioned
These are the shapes that survive, drawn from what the outlet keeps running rather than from what PR teams keep sending.
The first is the subculture with internal rules. A group has invented a system, enforces it, and has language outsiders do not understand. The story is the ethnography. A company fits in here when it is the infrastructure the subculture runs on.
The second is the person who broke the rules and is winning. Not an underdog story, a transgression story. Someone is doing the thing everyone agreed not to do, it is working, and the industry does not know what to do about it.
The third is the thing that is about to go wrong. Vice is comfortable with stories that have no resolution, which most outlets are not. An emerging practice with a visible failure mode is highly commissionable, and it does not require you to pretend the failure mode is not there.
The fourth is the economics underneath something people think is organic. How the money actually moves through a scene, who takes a cut, and what that does to the output. This is the angle most brands are best positioned to supply and most reluctant to pitch, because honesty about the economics is uncomfortable.
The fifth is the first-person descent. A writer goes into a world and comes back. This one you cannot pitch as a subject, you can only make it possible, which means it belongs with the access section above.
Notice what is absent. There is no funding announcement, no milestone, no survey result, no trend piece built on a vendor’s own data. Those are the five things PR teams send to Vice most often, and they are the five things it does not run.
Understand What the Outlet Is Now
A pitch built on the Vice of 2016 will miss, and a lot of them still are.
The company went through bankruptcy and restructuring, and what came out the other side is smaller, leaner, and more dependent on freelance commissioning than the operation people remember. Verticals have been consolidated. Headcount is down. The editors who are left are covering more ground with less support.
That changes the pitch in two useful ways. First, the appetite for ambitious reported features has not disappeared, but the budget to send someone somewhere has shrunk, which means an angle that can be reported remotely or locally to the writer is materially more commissionable than one requiring travel. If your story lives in one city, say which city early, because a writer who already lives there is a reason to commission.
Second, the volume of competing pitches has fallen along with the headcount, which cuts in your favour more than people assume. Fewer PR teams are pitching an outlet they think is diminished. The inbox is thinner than it was, and a genuinely good world-first angle has a better chance of being read now than it did at the outlet’s peak.
What has not changed is the editorial taste. The thing that made the outlet distinctive, a willingness to take a subculture seriously on its own terms and to publish stories with no tidy ending, survived the restructuring. Pitch to that taste and the institutional turbulence barely matters. Pitch a product launch and no amount of institutional change will help you.
Send It Short and Send It Once
Operational discipline, because the best angle dies in a badly built email.
Keep it under 200 words. Subject line that names the world rather than the company. No attachments, no press release pasted below, no logo in the signature block. Three paragraphs: the world, the access, who you are in one line. Link to one thing if a link genuinely helps.
Then follow up exactly once, after seven days, with two sentences that add something new rather than asking whether they saw the last email. If that goes unanswered, the angle was wrong for that writer, and the right move is a different angle to a different writer rather than a third email.
People ask about timing more than about anything else when they ask how to pitch Vice, and the honest answer is that it matters far less than the angle. A great world-first pitch sent on a Friday afternoon outperforms a product pitch sent at the statistically optimal Tuesday morning, every time.
One more discipline worth adopting: keep a running file of angles rather than writing them on demand. The pitches that work are noticed, not invented. A note in your phone every time you see something strange in your sector builds a bank of real observations, and when a writer who covers adjacent territory publishes something, you will have an angle to send within the hour rather than within the week. Speed of relevance beats polish in this inbox.
And accept the conversion rate honestly. A well-targeted campaign to five freelancers with a strong world-first angle might produce one commission, and that is a good result rather than a disappointing one. The failure mode is not a low hit rate, it is sending the same pitch to forty people and concluding the outlet does not respond to PR. It responds to stories. The entire question of how to pitch Vice reduces to whether you brought one.
The Flaunt piece from 2023 is still the clearest illustration. It worked because the pitch described a scene that a writer wanted to understand, and offered someone who could explain it. The company was incidental to the pitch and central to the outcome, which is exactly backwards from how most people write these emails, and exactly why it ran.