Former digital media darling Vice to shut down website and lay off hundreds of employees

“It is no longer cost-effective to deliver digital content the way we used to,” he wrote in the memo. “Going forward, as we fully transition to a studio model, we will explore partnering with established media companies to distribute our digital content, including news, on their global platforms.”

The fall of Vice represents one of the biggest media failures in recent memory, with the company going from darling of the digital media age to bankruptcy. Last year, Vice Media Group filed for bankruptcy and was sold for $350 million to former lenders led by investment giant Fortress Investment Group.

Journalists working at Vice spent the day desperately trying to save their work after hearing rumors that the site might soon be shut down. The site was still accessible as of Thursday night, and employees were told they would learn more about their fate early next week.

The people familiar with Fortress’s thinking spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss personnel issues candidly, but declined to elaborate on how many people would remain. “This company was established to no longer function as part of the media environment.”

Vice Media Group also includes other brands such as Refinery29, a digital site aimed at young women, and although management is “in advanced discussions to sell this business and continue that process” , the site will continue to operate. expected in the coming weeks, Dixon wrote in a memo.

Touted to the public as the future of media, Vice has grown from a free punk magazine in Montreal in the 1990s to a media conglomerate with 3,000 employees, offices around the world, an HBO show, a film production studio, and more.

Its brash co-founder, Shane Smith, is a master Vice salesman, betting that Vice is the future of digital media and that its gonzo approach to news will increasingly neutralize journalists’ old guard. He helped convince the family and the press. Smith predicted that Vice would surpass his CNN, ESPN and MTV.

Investors including 21st Century Fox, James Murdoch and Disney poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Vice. In 2014, Vice raised $500 million. By 2017, another investment round valued him at $5.7 billion, making him one of the most highly valued media companies of all time.

Vice was at the vanguard of a new wave of digital media because it offered content clearly aimed at millennials and also produced award-winning journalism. The station’s reporting department has won multiple Peabody Awards, including for stories on the Islamic State, white supremacists at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, and the plight of women and girls under Taliban rule in Afghanistan. did. In 2020, Vice, along with the Los Angeles Times and This American Life, published an audio report on kidnapped immigrants in Pulitzer.

And just this week, Vice News journalists won the George Polk Award for Television Reporting for their reporting on Russian mercenaries.

Vice was also embroiled in controversy after a 2018 New York Times investigation revealed a toxic work environment and sexual harassment allegations. One of the executives was ousted, and Smith and another co-founder said the company had a “boy’s club” culture and was “a safe, inclusive place where everyone, especially women, can feel respected and thrive.” He admitted that he had failed in “creating a friendly workplace.” Smith left the company’s top post in 2018.

Vice went through a series of layoffs and layoffs. The high hopes contained in the tremendous investments of the past never materialized. Last year, the company discontinued its flagship news show “Vice News Tonight” just before filing for bankruptcy protection.

After emerging from bankruptcy, Vice sold some of its brands, including fashion and culture magazine iD. It also implemented a series of layoffs, further sacrosanctizing the news division (reportedly, the company’s headcount has increased from (The number has dropped from a high of 3,000 to about 1,000.) In December, Vice experienced an increase in executive turnover, with Mike Lang, one of Hulu’s founding executives, taking over as interim executive chairman. (He was an advisor to Fortress.)

Vice joins the ranks of other boom-and-bust digital news companies. BuzzFeed News closed last year after 12 years of operation.

Last month, Messenger was permanently shut down after less than a year. That company, led by Jimmy Finkelstein, also shut down its website without notice after exhausting its $50 million budget and promise to hire 550 journalists within its first year.