Josh Visser
Josh Visser (external link) , ‘07, is an Executive Editor at VICE News.
This Q&A was conducted when Josh Visser was the Executive Editor at VICE News, he is now the Editor in Chief.
What did you originally see yourself doing when you first enrolled in journalism school?
If I remember correctly, I was hoping to become a fiction writer and wanted to have some day job skills. So, that didn’t exactly work out.
How has your journalism degree and what you learned in school prepared you for your current career?
What I liked about the journalism program was how close the schoolwork resembled the work we were training for. Coming to newspaper class and being expected to file a story within five hours, shooting and editing a same-day news story for TV, blabbing about sports in a recording room for a podcast. Also, both the school paper and The Eyeopener prepared you for folks taking issue with your stories, making you think about the impact of your work and why you are doing it. (And also give you a bit of a safety net to make mistakes and learn from them.)
What are some memorable moments you’ve had since graduating?
In no particular order; Covering TIFF for CTV for a few years in a row and interviewing an all-time great such as Phillip Seymour Hoffman (sadly, just a couple of years before he died), but also running into people like Adam Scott having a beer by himself at a bad party or chatting with some of my faves like character actor Scoot McNairy or director Michael Dowse. Also, I watched a zillion movies, most of them pretty good.
The Rob Ford era when I was at the National Post. It’s so bizarre and sad in retrospect, but it was wild at the time, literally millions of people around the globe were reading Canadian coverage of the “wacky local mayor.” I was largely working with Natalie Alcoba (also a TMU grad, ‘06), who later defected with me to VICE in 2015, and that was a personal highlight.
At VICE, the first half of my career there was rewarding for all the incredible young writers I got to work with (like Eternity Martis, to namecheck one person), many of whom weren’t getting the opportunity to work with their voice in the Canadian media marketplace. In the second half, I’ve been working mostly on extremism, particularly the far-right, which has been a real bummer obviously for the state of the world, but has been rewarding professionally, particularly because our team has often been at the bleeding edge of what is happening out there.
What advice would you give to current journalism students?
Work for The Eyeopener! Don’t work for free for non-student media. Ask editors and producers to go for a coffee to get a better understanding of the landscape and just maybe find a professional mentor (they’ll pay). This is quite a cliché, but try to find a way to work what you are passionate about, into your job. Your interests and inexperience should be seen as valuable to an employer, who likely needs help finding the next TikTok (or BeReal or what have you) and finding the stories that connect with young people.
Anything you wanted to add?
Pitch me at josh.visser@vice.com!
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Grads at Work is a series of profiles of alums. If you know of a notable grad you’d like to see featured, send us an email at office.journalism@torontomu.ca.