Rebecca Nicholson, the first female Editor-in-Chief of VICE UK, begins her talk at the Cambridge Union with a trailer for Rule Britannia, a VICE documentary which aims to represent and the stories and people who "fall through the cracks of the mainstream media" – as, Nicholson explains, could be true of all of VICE’s reporting.

The candid scenes of fighting, drinking, shoplifting and taking drugs are nicely incongruous in the Union’s main chamber and take us, if only briefly, out of the Cambridge bubble of privilege. Once the video has stunned the chamber to silence, Nicholson wryly jokes that we can see that VICE always appear to be filming during the night.

What is particularly striking about Nicholson is the high regard and respect which she appears to bestow upon both the audience in the chamber and the readers of VICE. She is cautious, as she admits on multiple occasions, about making sweeping statements about "what young people want", particularly to a room full of them, and explains that she opts instead to hire young editors and writers – rejecting the idea of young people as an abstract focus group, only to be consulted from time to time. Of the possibility that young people have a lower attention span, increasingly demanding mere clickbait, she says, “It’s a false assumption. Talking down to you as a reader, [implying] that you don’t have the attention span for anything more than a cat gif is insulting.”

Nicholson’s attitude towards her readership does not seem like a clever marketing strategy so much as the result of a deliberate shift on her part away from financial considerations and towards serious and insightful judgement of young people’s relationship to the media. This is evident when I ask her about Broadly, one of VICE’s several channels – one aimed particularly at women. Given some newspaper and magazine’s tendencies to categorise ‘women’ as a separate area of interest, after news, politics, etc., I was interested to hear her views on articles targeted specifically at one gender.

“It’s really important to us that that isn’t a ghetto for women and for our female readers,” she says, “and I don’t think we treat it like that.”

“[We] wouldn’t say ‘you’re a female reader, you’re interested solely in women’s issues.' I would hope that it exists as something that means we can tell those stories in more detail and tell more of them, but we would certainly never not cover women’s stuff on Vice.com either.”

Nicholson’s interest in for telling the untold stories renders it somewhat inevitable that the conversation soon turns to the role of women working in the journalism industry and the struggles she and her female colleagues have faced.

“I think that the way some sorts of journalism, especially news reporting, is set up isn’t really set up for women, particularly women who have children,” she says.

“The environment’s just not suited to that because it’s a culture of: you get in early, you get your stories, you get your scoop, you go to the pub, you drink about it and then you go back and you do the same thing again. It’s a really kind of demanding lifestyle.”

Although Nicholson tells me that she has not personally experienced a gender-bias against women, she speaks of a recent Guardian investigation, which found that women are vastly more likely than men to receive negative comments on their online articles; of the ten most abused journalists on the site, eight are women. Referring to the implications of such comments in the public sphere and the possibility of using a website without comment-boxes, she says:

“I’ve kind of changed my view slightly on it, from thinking that discussion is a good thing. […] It’s difficult with a site like the Guardian when it’s so huge; they would need to employ so many moderators.

“It just is worse for women. It’s so much worse for women and it’s so much more personal and it’s so much more abusive. I think ultimately you have to say not ‘how do you deal with it?’ but ‘why should you have to deal with it?”’

With an enthusiasm which suggests gratitude, rather than mere name-dropping, Nicholson describes two particularly inspiring female journalists with whom she worked at the Guardian – older colleagues who took the time to mentor her.

“‘I would say that there’s a responsibility for more established journalists to take the responsibility to encourage younger female journalists.” she says.

“I would always like to do that in my career – encourage women. I think you should always, always try and encourage younger female journalists to come through. It is an extra effort; make that effort because it’s worth it.”

Earnest and softly-spoken, Nicholson continues, throughout her interview, to be as unassuming and understated as VICE is loud and explosive. Perhaps it is tempting to think of magazine and newspaper editors to be the walking personifications of their own publications. To some extent this is not irrational; Anna Wintour is considered almost as glamorous and frosty as the pristine world into which Vogue allows us glimpses and Ian Hislop constantly presents the mixture of outraged bafflement and bemused scepticism we’ve come to associate with the pages of Private Eye. Yet for Rebecca Nicholson, it’s clear that the relationship between reporter and subject, as between editor and reader, is somewhat more complex, for the very nature of VICE is to tell the untold stories and present them to an audience who are neither homogenous nor apathetic.

As she describes VICE's "healthy disdain for things as they are", one can't help but feel that she is talking as much about the way mainstream journalism works as VICE's anti-establishment stance on politics and current affairs. What is remarkable about Nicholson is that her desire to give a voice to the stories which would otherwise go unheard extends far beyond the pages and videos of VICE.