Publisher Shanon Kelley was talking with staffers at the new Vice channel Broadly a few days ago when she casually mentioned Kelly Bundy – the dim-witted and promiscuous character played by Christina Applegate in the 1987-97 sitcom Married…with Children.
In Vice parlance, this was a definite “Don’t.” The blank stares that greeted the reference suggested to Kelley that she is no longer standing atop the rapidly shifting sands of modern pop culture.
Kelley has arrived at the largely forgotten Fox sitcom via a question about the editorial voice of Broadly, the female-focused site that represents the 11th entity in Vice’s digital portfolio – a group that also includes Vice News, Vice Sports and the food-focused Munchies.
“If I haven’t heard of someone that’s likely nothing, so I’ll ask one of the younger kids we work with and they’ll be able to tell me right away: ‘Oh that’s not cool,’” she said. “It has to be from the authentic younger voice, and a lot of that is our staff.”
Described as a “women’s interest channel,” Broadly launched this week in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. CPG giant Unilever is on-board as launch partner, with a preliminary emphasis on its Tresemmé, Vaseline and Degree brands (Dove is expected to be featured on the channel in the future).
Kelley said Broadly plans to introduce sponsored shows with Unilever in about a month. “They’ve been so great and so supportive of everything we’re doing,” she said. “We’re trying to find like-minded brands that want to be relevant in this space.”
Broadly is a video-driven property catering to millennial women. Unlike other Vice properties that focus on what Kelley described as “passion points,” Broadly’s editorial mandate, like that of the original Vice.com, is wide-ranging.
“Obviously being a woman is not a passion point, it’s an identity, so Broadly is more like a Vice.com in that we cover everything the other channels do,” she said. “There’s a lot of overlap [with other Vice properties], but we’re definitely bringing in a whole new audience – especially women that wouldn’t ordinarily read Vice because it’s very male-heavy.”
Kelley said Broadly will eschew the “fashion, beauty and products” approach favoured by so many female-focused properties in favour of original storytelling on key women’s issues like reproductive rights, rape culture, etc. The content will be delivered with the take-no-prisoners approach that Vice is (in)famous for.
“You have a lot of sites out there that are just reacting to the news,” she said. “Our main goal is to really report on the news and not be biased. We’re not trying to tell women what to think – we just want to present everything to them in a very honest way.
“We’re not undermining women’s intelligence, we speak to it.”
Broadly has been in development for about 10 months, ever since Kelley, in her business development role, approached Vice co-founder Shane Smith with the idea for a female-focused channel that would become something of an outlier in Vice’s stable of male-skewing properties.
As it turns out, former Jezebel editor-in-chief Tracie Egan Morrissey – who officially joined Vice in March to lead Broadly – had proposed a similar concept to Smith just a week before. “[Smith said] ‘Why don’t you go meet with her and if you guys like each other and you want to do this, I’ll green-light it because it’s a great idea,’” said Kelley. “It was very serendipitous.”
Broadly is launching with three new series:
- Ovary Action explores reproductive health from all angles, giving viewers information on everything from the latest in fertility technology to reproductive-rights legislation;
- Broadly Meets is a “provocative” interview show that features favourite stars and “world-changing women”;
- Style and Error, a show about women’s fashion that promises to make the aspirational elements of the industry more accessible by “getting super deep with the superficial”
Other planned additions to the Broadly roster include Gangs, which explores how women around the world band together over common interests to create all-female collectives, and Samburu: Land of No Men, a full-length documentary that travels to Kenya to learn about a group of women who were abandoned by their community and opted to start one of their own.
While the emphasis is on female-focused stories, Kelley said she expects the channel to have broad appeal. “We’re definitely expecting to get a pretty big male audience just because of the fact that men like to listen in on the conversation and want to know what we’re talking about,” she said.
