Vice Media Crashes, Set to Lay off Hundreds of Workers

Vice announced on Feb. 22 that they will lay off hundreds of its 900 staffers and will stop publishing content on their Vice.com site.

Angry staffers vented on social media that they may even be blocked from retrieving articles that they have produced in the past.

The organization that once sent journalists around the globe and attracted investments from Disney, AT&T and TPG Corp. will now transition to a studio production model trying to hang on to a few assets.

The Writers Guild of America East, which unionized Vice Media editorial workers back in 2015, blasted the latest cutbacks.

“We can no longer express shock and surprise that VICE has determined its only way forward is to lay people off,” the union said in its statement. “Entire teams were gutted, and scores of people lost their jobs [Feb. 22], according to the union statement which said the announcement of the deep cutbacks was made “in a typically sloppy fashion.” The union said it considers the cutbacks “another example of the utter contempt that this company shows its workers.”

It is only the latest site to face strong headwinds that have hit both legacy publishers such as Conde Nast and former digital darlings such as Buzzfeed. Another recent casualty was the short-lived news site The Messenger, which shutdown at the end of Jan. Co-founder and CEO Jimmy Finkelstein, who raised $50 million to launch the site a site a year ago, was scrambling to secure funding until the publication collapsed. The Los Angeles Times laid off over 100, including its sole New York bureau person, The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal all made cuts in recent months. Departing staffers at the New York Daily News are not being replaced and the News Guild of New York said only 54 people are left in its editorial ranks.

Vice initially planned to do a public offering, but none has come to pass. Vice was previously valued at $5.7 billion in 2017 but after it declared bankruptcy in May 2023 was purchased by its three creditors Fortress Investment Group, Soros Fund Management and Monroe Capital for only $350 million in July 2023.

After rumors swirled for days that more cutbacks were ahead, Vice CEO Bruce Dixon made it official on Feb. 22.

“This decision was not made lightly, and I understand the significant impact it will have on those affected,” Dixon said in a memo obtained by several news organization. Dixon said that impacted employees will be notified the week of Feb. 26.

Earlier on Feb. 22, editors from different parts of Vice met with their staff and informed them that they have asked management for clarity in the situation but have not received a reply.

Josh Visser, a top editor for Vice is not on board with the way things have turned out.

“Our website and our work being pulled down would be completely reprehensible,” Visser told staffers. “I cannot even understand any business reasons why you would do something like that.”

Visser is not the only one with the complaints. Current employees are showing their angst via Twitter.

After the announcement from Dixon, a digital media employee, Janus Rose, wrote to X formerly known as Twitter that the company has “shut off our ability to download our emails after we received an anonymous tip that they’re going to be deleting our entire website today. Fun times in the media death spiral!!!”

A freelance writer for Vice, Carolyn Petit commented on Rose’s post on Twitter, “Awful. Just hastily copied all my VICE freelance pieces into a Google Doc.”

Vice’s large newsrooms once filled with rows of journalists are now going to be empty.

Vice Media determined that it is “no longer cost-effective” for them to distribute its digital content the way it used to, Dixon said. So, they will partner with established media companies to distribute their digital content, including news, on their global platforms, as they transition to a studio model.

“Our financial partners are supportive and have agreed to invest in this operating model going forward. We will emerge stronger and more resilient as we embark on this new phase of our journey,” Dixon said.

Staffers have not yet heard from management in response to their concerns. As of Feb. 23, no WARN notice about the layoffs had yet to be filed with the NYS Dept. of Labor.

The company has started as an alternative magazine by Shane Smith and a handful of colleagues in Montreal, Canada. Before setting up shop in Brooklyn, NY and pushing the boundaries, while also absorbing claims, he fostered a sexist and misogynist workplace environment. Smith was eventually replaced by a woman, CEO, Nancy Dubuc, a former CEO of A+E who set about improving its toxic workplace environment. The company started Motherboard and acquired the women’s digital company Refinery 29 as Dubuc set about trying to change the culture. But she was not able to reverse the digital nose dive. In Feb., 2023, she was out after a five year run and two months later, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.