Vice News this week will launch a personal-finance talk show on YouTube, “The Business of Life,” sponsored by Bank of America, which youth-skewing brand says will fill a gap in the media landscape for financial advice aimed at millennial audiences.
The bi-weekly series, premiering Wednesday, April 22, is hosted by Vice contributor and Daily Beast columnist Michael C. Moynihan. Each episode, to run about 20 minutes, will cover issues pertaining to younger consumers, such as dealing with student debt and how plan for starting a family. The show will feature a panel of writers, policy experts and scholars.
“Business of Life” is sponsored by Bank of America’s Better Money Habits Better initiative. The show will display the sponsor’s logo at the beginning of each episode, which is similar to the “traditional PBS-model of sponsorship,” a Vice spokesman said. Vice News retains complete editorial control over the program, he added.
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For Vice News, which launched on YouTube about a year ago, the expansion brings it into a new category to serve its growing audience. About 80% of the Vice News viewers are between 13-34, according to Vice Media.
More broadly, the show reinforces Vice Media’s positioning as a next-generation news org. The New York-based company last month reached a four-year deal with HBO, under which Vice will produce a daily newscast airing weekdays starting later in 2015.
The premiere episode of “Business of Life” will cover the issue of millenialls entering and reshaping the U.S workforce. Moynihan will be joined by Planet Money’s Adam Davidson, Bloomberg View’s Megan McArdle and Jamelle Bouie of Slate.
“While the media landscape has dramatically transformed during my years as a journalist, one thing has remained depressingly constant: economic news and coverage of money issues has always skewed towards the wealthy and old,” Moynihan said. “With ‘The Business of Life,’ our goal is to seize upon the failure of traditional media and produce a show that features topics young people care about — addressed by a panel of experts from disparate backgrounds and opinions, who don’t speak wonk.”
Vice News said it plans to expand coverage of finance in the coming months. Among other recent programming launches, Vice News in February launched its first live talk show, “On the Line,” which airs weekly.
