Private Equity Firm Grim Reaper Comes For VICE, Hundreds Laid Off

In a memo to staff Thursday afternoon, VICE CEO Bruce Dixon announced that there would be massive layoffs and that the vice.com site would be shut down at the behest of Fortress Investment Group, the private equity company that bought it out in June. This same company was also responsible for laying off thousands of other workers at Gannett newspapers. It’s almost as if they are literally just buying up media companies in hopes of purging them of journalists!

The actual writers and staff at VICE have done incredible work over the years despite comically bad mismanagement coming from the from the C-suite executives who managed to pay themselves enormous salaries and bonuses (and spend a weird amount of money on milk) even while filing for bankruptcy. The company will now focus on “content distribution” to “established media companies” and on their social channels.

Here it is, in all its infuriating glory:

Dear Vice Team,

As we navigate the ever-evolving business landscape, we need to adapt and best align our strategies to be more competitive in the long term. After careful consideration and discussion with the board, we have decided to make some fundamental changes to our strategic vision at Vice.

We create and produce outstanding original content true to the Vice brand. However, it is no longer cost-effective for us to distribute our digital content the way we have done previously.

Moving forward, we will look to partner with established media companies to distribute our digital content, including news, on their global platforms, as we fully transition to a studio model.

As part of this shift, we will no longer publish content on vice.com, instead putting more emphasis on our social channels as we accelerate our discussions with partners to take our content to where it will be viewed most broadly.

Separately, Refinery 29 will continue to operate as a standalone diversified digital publishing business, creating engaging, social first content.

As you know, we are in advanced discussions to sell this business, and we are continuing with that process. We expect to announce more on that in the coming weeks.

With this strategic shift comes the need to realign our resources and streamline our overall operations at Vice. Regrettably, this means that we will be reducing our workforce, eliminating several hundred positions. This decision was not made lightly, and I understand the significant impact it will have on those affected. Employees who will be affected will notified about next steps early next week, consistent with local laws and practices.

I know that saying goodbye to our valued colleagues is difficult and feels overwhelming, but this is the best path forward for Vice as we position the company for long-term creative and financial success. 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.

Thank you for your continued dedication to Vice and support during this time of transition.

Together, I am confident that we will overcome any challenges and achieve our shared goals.

Bruce

Well, fuck you, Bruce.

I don’t know about you, but I’m about to unsubscribe from every single one of VICE’s social channels, if I am even following them.

We don’t have to tell you that this is bad. Not just for the VICE staff that was laid off, not just for writers and journalists in general, but for everyone. For our country as a whole, especially during a pretty important election. If all of the news is behind a paywall or coming through social media or being written by AI instead of actual human journalists with actual human editors, that is going to be very, very bad.

This is what happens when you put AI in charge of things. Rats with weirdly enormous penises popping up in peer-reviewed journals.

This comes as Google performed an “experiment,” eliminating the “news” tab in searches for some users. It was not very popular! As hard as Silicon Valley types have tried to eliminate “reading things written by actual human beings” as a popular way to get news or information, people still do actually want to read. Weird, I know!

Let’s remember that what happened to so many of these companies that went under — VICE, Buzzfeed, Mic, Pitchfork — happened in part because they were so successful that people whose main goal was making piles of money expanded them to death, dropped absurd amounts of money on huge, fancy offices in New York City and required workers to move there in order to work onsite, spent way too much money on other stupid things and then had to call in private equity firms to bail them out. Maybe it’s not so much that “people hate reading news now!” as much as that this is not an industry that is all that conducive to rich people raking in piles of money and spending it on stupid things the way venture capitalists and private equity firms and other people who should have nothing to do with journalism want.

I have worked in digital media for a decade. I’ve worked for independent sites like this and I’ve worked for digital media conglomerates like Spinmedia (which went under the same way these other sites did). Experientially, the C-Suite added absolutely nothing of value, and in fact only ever made decisions that made things worse and made people less likely to read the sites under their purview. People like to read, but they don’t like to read things that look like they were written by an AI robot trained on SEO. Weird, I know.

There are obviously other reasons why things have been difficult in digital media. Social media sites have throttled us and made it more or less impossible to pay a staff with money from ads alone, in pursuit of creating their own self-contained information ecosystems.

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VICE deserved better than this. The writers and editors there deserved better than this. We deserve better than this, as consumers of media and we should all be angry that this happened and that it keeps happening.

It doesn’t seem like much will change with the precarious digital media conglomerates. It feels sometimes like we’re always waiting for the next site to shutter or the next round of layoffs to commence. But there are smaller sites (like us!) out there that are doing great work — some of them, like Defector, 404 Media, and Hellgate that were created by those who were laid off from or left some of the larger sites. If that’s the future of digital media, I can’t say I’d be mad about it.

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