Vice Media CEO, Shane Smith conducted a lengthy interview with Fortune Magazine this past week, covering subjects ranging from Dennis Rodman and North Korea, to making money from YouTube and telling old media that they can “go to hell”.

These are our highlights:

A lot of people are successfully building audiences on YouTube, many complain that monetization is still pretty challenging – that it’s digital pennies, compared with analog dollars. Machinima, which you mentioned, recently laid off 10% of its staff. Is the same not true for Vice?

Look at the Creators Project [a channel focused on the intersection of art and technology]. We made a deal at the brand level (with Intel). We’re going to make content that young people are going to enjoy, and it is going to help your brand. Then we make that content. We exploit that content. We have a TV show in China, we have mobile in India, we license it to TV in 23 countries in the world, we create a YouTube (GOOG) channel. It drives subscriptions, and it drives millions of video views. Intel (INTC) is happy because they are getting more ads at more scale globally. We get paid for the content before we ever put it on YouTube. Those are the types of deals that you have to make. Brands want scale. They want engagement. If you just wait for somebody else to make money for you, I don’t believe that’s going to happen.

We don’t do branded content. We do content that is sponsored by brands. And that’s no different than TV or radio or magazines.

Not everyone is a fan of your approach to the news. You’ve been roundly criticized for filming Dennis Rodman in North Korea. Around that time, your site proclaimed that “North Korea has a friend in Dennis Rodman and Vice.” What’s your response to the criticism?

First of all, any dialogue is good with any country especially if there’s aggression. Look, I’m not allowed to go to North Korea because I did two documentaries in North Korea and one outside North Korea on the slave labor camps in Siberia that were harshly critical of the regime. Vice has made no secret of our criticism of the North Korean regime.

Every time mainstream media says we are not doing it correctly, we say “Sure. We are doing it our own way.” We are also not saying we are the best in the world. We are out there, we are making content, and doing stories that young people resonate with. If that doesn’t satisfy the old guard, they can go to hell quite frankly.

What’s your advice for traditional media execs who are trying to migrate online?

You can’t retrofit it. If there’s a bunch of old dudes in a boardroom that go, “OK. Let’s start making video,” what they try to do is hire pedigreed people. What you get is a shittier version of TV. You really have to rip out the pipes. You have to make things in a different way, hire people who have never worked in TV or commercials or film, get people straight out of schools, get people who don’t know what they’re doing, form your own school and train these kids. The reason I’m telling you all this, the reason I’m giving away my secrets, is that’s it’s nearly impossible to do.

If you think you’re going to raise $50 million or $100 million and go out and hire people who’ve done it before to do TV online, you’re going to fail.

To read the whole thing, click HERE.

[Source : Fortune]