Vice News Tonight is the product of HBO’s four-year extension of its deal with Vice, which was agreed to in March 2015. It will debut on the network in September. Vice News Tonight will be a half-hour newscast, running for 48 weeks a year and featuring the visceral on-the-ground reporting found on the weekly HBO show Vice, but now on a nightly basis.
“The nightly news hasn’t changed its format in 60 years, whereas the way most viewers — particularly younger viewers — consume information has changed dramatically,” said Josh Tyrangiel, head of Vice News Tonight, who joined the company after stints as chief content officer for Bloomberg and editor of Bloomberg Businessweek, in a press release. “We understand that people aren’t going to watch Vice News Tonight out of obligation. We’re going to have to earn people’s time and attention with great reporting and original forms of storytelling, something Vice has excelled at for several years now.”
This may be Vice’s first foray into delivering daily news on television, but according to the company’s CEO, Vicenews.com is proof Vice News Tonight can work. “We launched Vice News about a year ago online,” Vice CEO Shane Smith said on CNBC’s Closing Bell last March. “We’ve been doing hourly news, we’ve been doing daily news on that platform.”
Since Tyrangiel came to Vice from Bloomberg in October, remnants of some of the biggest news organizations have formed Vice News Tonight‘s staff. Madeleine Haeringer, former senior producer at NBC News and MSNBC, joined in April as executive producer. Along with Haeringer, Christina Vallice (NBC Nightly News), Evan McMorris-Santoro (BuzzFeed), Nellie Bowles (The Guardian), and Ravi Somaiya (The New York Times) join a litany of high-profile new hires.
Vice News Tonight will premiere at 7:30 p.m. ET on September 26 on HBO, and will be available on HBO Now, HBO Go, HBO On Demand, and its affiliate portals.
