Vice Media Launches New Women's Channel, Broadly

Vice Media on Monday launched Broadly, a new "female-focused" digital channel dedicated to bringing women into the fold of the brash and bawdy alternative media company.

"I'm not going to use a bunch of flowery language about some bulls--t if I can just get directly to the point, which is that Broadly is a feminist channel," Broadly's editor-in-chief Tracie Egan Morrissey said in a letter to readers posted on the site. "New media has been a game-changer for feminism -- its appeal is palpable and undeniable."

Vice's audience is 65 percent male, according to its 2014 press kit; at its main site, its news channel and tech section Motherboard, the male share is even bigger at 70 percent. Vice Sports, according to the company, is 61 to 39 male-to-female.

Morrissey, a former editor at Gawker Media's women's site Jezebel, will oversee Broadly's batch of digital series, from documentaries to the channel's own talk shows. A taste of the offerings was on display after its launch Monday: a 30-minute reported feature on medical abortion, a photo essay that exploring the cultural phenomenon of "good girls," "How To Make A Dildo," and a collaborative effort by staff, the Broadly Guide to Men.

And it wouldn't be a Vice property without a few articles like "The Face of Juggalo Feminism," a piece exploring the burgeoning feminism within Insane Clown Posse's freakishly hardcore fanbase.

Morrissey was not immediately available to comment.

With Broadly, Vice has come a long way from its testosterone-charged roots, particularly under the shadow of its reactionary founder Gavin McInnes, who is on record as being opposed to feminism and now spends his days writing essays such as "When Is It OK to Hit a Woman?" (McInnes departed from Vice in 2007, a fact that the company is quick to remind you of should you bring him up.)

Still, as an interview with Morrissey in Wired noted last week, Broadly's unabashed feminist debut marks a significant milestone for Vice in its decades-long transformation from a Canadian machismo magazine to a leading new media company valued last year at $2.5 billion. It's not hard to imagine what McInnes would make of it.

More is in store: The series "Ovary Action" will be dedicated to exploring news and views surrounding reproductive rights, from angles such as politics and technology, while "Style and Error" will house Vice's own style of coverage of the fashion industry.

"The same principals Vice applies to its storytelling will also apply to everything Broadly will do -- we're telling original stories you can't find anywhere else, in the same voice and tone as that of our audience," Broadly's publisher Shanon Kelley said in a press release.

The channel will be supported by Unilever, the British-Dutch consumer goods multinational.