Alanedit

Editors who worked on Vice’s verticals (music, video, fashion, sports, etc.) tell us they started at salaries of $24K-$26K, sometimes rising to a whopping $30K after six months or a year of good performance. For editors who run verticals, salaries are “about $40K,” said one ex-employee. And that’s at the upper end— “I can tell you that as one of the higher level editors of one of the highest trafficked verticals, I make less than 40k a year,” another editor told us. “A designer for print was making $28K” in 2013, we’re told. A video editor who worked for Vice for two years said “the wage was $27K/year.” Another person who left recently after holding relatively important editor-level job told us that, in her experience, “Rarely anyone makes over $45,000.” Freelancers—writers, photographers, illustrators, and otherwise—tell us the rates are low, and that Vice (like many other publications) is often slow in paying them. Salaries at Vice Media and the company’s pay rate for contract work were described to us as “a pittance,” “a fucking joke,” and “so low I couldn’t even consider it, it was offensive.”

If you think education is expensive try ignorance