Vice's First Female EIC Lays Out Her Vision

Racked is no longer publishing. Thank you to everyone who read our work over the years. The archives will remain available here; for new stories, head over to Vox.com, where our staff is covering consumer culture for The Goods by Vox. You can also see what we’re up to by signing up here.

Ellis Jones, the first female editor-in-chief of Vice in the magazine's 20-year history, is making some major changes to Vice's content. It's going to be journalism with "capital-J Journalistic weight," according to a profile in New York magazine. She started by cutting the magazine's fashion content. Those pages are replaced by work from photojournalists, and Jones is bringing in investigative reporters and young literary talent like former Hairpin editor Edith Zimmerman.

For her first issue, Jones included a 6,500-word investigative piece on the killing of a transgender Filipina woman by a U.S. marine and a new work by ex-Believer editor Heidi Julavits. Jones acknowledged that Vice is maturing, saying: "I’m trying to figure out how to bring in an audience we never had before. To make them realize that it’s not a lad’s mag, and that we don’t just do dick and fart jokes."

Jones, who has spent much of her career at Vice, understands that she will naturally be a spokesperson for gender politics at the magazine. "People love to hate Vice," Jones told New York magazine. "If something wrong came out about women, everyone would look at me and be like, ‘Well … Vice has a female editor-in-chief — what does she think about it?’"